Walking the path

(3-minute read)

A week ago, our son, Stephen, asked if we would keep his dog, Luna, while he moved to a new apartment. He did an interesting thing. When he dropped off Luna, as he was leaving amongst all of the “be a good girl” comments, he said in a commanding voice, “STAY.” When he left, there was no whining or barking. She knew she was supposed to stay with us. I watched him do this before, and though I can’t be sure what the dog was thinking, it seemed like the dog felt when he left she was supposed to go with him unless he told her to stay. If she stayed without him telling her, she was doing something wrong.

I couldn’t help but think that the Lord had recently done something similar to me. I’ve been in bad health lately. I have slowly deteriorated with a condition the doctors can’t diagnose. Each day, it seemed like I was getting weaker, and I thought my life was circling the drain. I was surprised at how much work was involved in getting my affairs in order for the end. On March 30th of this year, I felt the Lord spoke to me similarly to how one hears their conscience speaking and said, “There’s something I want you to learn.” I found out he wanted me to learn a new way of writing. It didn’t matter for a blog, but it was critical for writing something longer, such as a book. I’ve written the first draft of several books, and they were all so terrible that I didn’t bother with a rewrite.

Writing a book is a significant time commitment. In my experience with the Lord, he has never asked me to learn something unless I would use it. In him asking this of me, he was saying, “STAY.” The Lord picks the time for our death, and it sounded like he was saying to me this isn’t yours.

I’m dyslexic, and when I read, I am constantly rereading the previous sentence unless I force myself not to. This carries over into my writing, where I continuously edit as I’m writing. The real problem with this, which I’ve discovered, is that I’m editing out all of the original thought in its infant form before it ever has a chance to develop. Learning to not do this seems like such a small, easy thing to do. I would find out when trying to do it that it was neither small nor easy. I am constantly editing my life as it goes. I plan out what I will do in advance, even if it’s a small task around the house. I think about what could go wrong and develop a backup plan in case it does. I suppose everyone does this to a degree, but I think my wife would sometimes like me to “stop planning and enjoy the moment.”

With artificial intelligence coming on the scene, the thing writers have that artificial intelligence has difficulty with is original thought. When AI is writing something, it looks into its massive databank of what has been written before to decide how to write what someone is asking it to do. If it looks into that databank and sees an author has written 2 + 2 = 5, it compares it to its mass of data and finds out that it stands alone and rightly assumes that it’s wrong. To artificial intelligence, most original thoughts appear wrong.

When most new technologies come out, they commonly appear to take away people’s employment. When word processing first came out, there was a bit of an uproar that it would do away with secretarial jobs, and for the most part, it did. Word processing made it so that far more people could write their own letters, books, and blogs. It was a difficult transition for some but good for mankind.

Each day since I felt the Lord spoke to me on March 30th, I have felt physically better, even though it hasn’t shown up on any of the medical equipment yet. It could be psychological, or it might just be that the Lord has unexpected plans for me.