zonovergoten

Ik zit in een baan om de zon ben een jaar onderweg voor ik weer op dezelfde plek kom elk rondje maal ik met iedereen mee te land in de lucht en op zee bij iedereen in de atmosfeer neemt al het goede zijn keer en al het andere evenzeer ik zou willen dat het niet zo was maar ook ik draai mee om eigen as net als ieder kind in elke klas elke vogel in zijn nest van noord naar oost van zuid naar west elke koe op stal iedere muis in de val elke kat voor het raam ieder wezen zonder naam massaal in het reusachtig draaiend rad keren en draaien om het eigen gat zowel de levenden als de dooien of we nu hoge of lage ogen gooien wel of niet zitten klooien de oranje, de groene en de rooie de lelijken, goeien, slechten en de mooie het herdertje, de rammen en de ooien hetzelfde blokje aan onzichtbaar spit rondom de grote hittepit als halve garen rondom draaien terwijl dat roekeloze vuur blijft laaien en wij maar maaien eerst de ene kant dan de andere die golf beweging zal niet verandere sommigen keren in de duisternis anderen in het volle licht sommigen mensen gaan lekker rond anderen voelen zich ertoe verplicht de ene gang valt zwaar op de maag een ander maaltje vederlicht het is maar of je er om maalt of niet of je de lol van het ommetje in ziet zo ja dan heb je het diploma behaald zo niet dan wordt het een moeilijk verhaal

I’ve completed one month with Debian stable. It sounds dramatic, but it’s actually been a positive experience.

Switching from a rolling release like openSUSE Tumbleweed was quite a change, but I’ve really come to like the stable foundation Debian offers.

Some software is a few versions older—which isn’t a big deal—but there are also things that aren’t (or aren’t yet) available in the Debian repositories.

But for that, there’s Flatpak, which I trust more than random third-party repositories.

Right now, my only issue is that my custom-built AMD PC occasionally and very rarely freezes. I’m on the case, though, and I actually suspect it’s a third-party program that doesn’t come from the Debian repo.

On the bright side of committing to Debian for a year, I’ve now got a solid backup strategy in place with Déjà Dup, Timeshift, and Dotdrop. Thanks to that, reinstalling the system is a breeze – especially helpful since I tend to tinker more than a lot!

Since I’ve still got 11 months with Debian ahead of me, one of my current projects is learning how to create .deb packages. The Debian documentation is excellent—but also quite complex!

But my first attempt with rofi 2.0 was a success—so maybe in 11 months, I’ll have my own repo! ;)

All in all: A positive experience in the first month and a happy outlook for the next 11 months with Debian. Beyond the technical aspects, there’s also the good feeling of being on the right side.

Researchers recently discovered a 67,800 year-old piece of cave art in Indonesia which predates humans' migration to the European continent. My first reaction upon learning of this was of awe. Imagining early humans trekking across the globe, the vast unknown before them, is incredible. This discovery provides us with greater insight into human history, and how we came to occupy every corner of the planet.

The piece of this discovery that intrigued me the most was the cave painting itself. This piece of art, left behind by our ancestors thousands of years ago, is all that's left of their presence on the island. The art they created was a marker to the world of their existence.

The reason this aspect of the story resonated so much with me is because of our current relationship with art and the value we put on it. In our increasingly culturally-corrosive, late-stage capitalist society, the value of art is measured in “likes” and online virality. What we're losing when we don't bring our art into the real world is the impact it has on creating community. The collective, communal experience of art is something that I worry we will lose sight of in our online, isolating society.

What we leave behind, what marks our passage through time, is the art we physically create and share in the real world. I believe it's important to continue to create art and share it out in the real world. Zines, graffiti, CDs, paintings, are all physical pieces of art that can be shared in community and mark our presence in the real world.

Strive to create modern-day cave paintings, because they may be all that remains to mark our time on Earth.

The numbers should give anyone pause. Data centres worldwide consumed approximately 415 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024, representing about 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. By 2030, that figure is projected to reach 945 terawatt hours, nearly doubling in just six years. The culprit driving much of this growth has a familiar name: artificial intelligence. The same technology that promises to optimise our energy grids, monitor deforestation from orbit, and accelerate the discovery of climate solutions is itself becoming one of the most rapidly growing sources of energy demand on the planet.

This is the defining contradiction of our technological moment. We are building systems powerful enough to model the entire Earth's climate, predict extreme weather events with unprecedented accuracy, and optimise the operation of cities in real time. Yet these very systems require data centres that consume as much electricity as 100,000 households. The largest facilities under construction today will use twenty times that amount. Training a single large language model can emit more carbon dioxide than five cars produce over their entire lifetimes. And as AI becomes embedded in everything from web searches to medical diagnostics to autonomous vehicles, its aggregate energy footprint is accelerating faster than almost any other category of industrial activity.

The question is no longer abstract. It is urgent, measurable, and contested. Will artificial intelligence prove to be our most powerful tool for addressing climate change, or will its insatiable appetite for energy accelerate the very crisis it promises to solve?

Monitoring the Planet from Above

The most compelling case for AI's climate potential begins not in server rooms but in orbit. Climate TRACE, a global coalition co-led by former United States Vice President Al Gore, uses artificial intelligence to analyse satellite imagery and remote sensing data, generating emissions estimates from over 352 million sources worldwide. Unlike traditional emissions reporting, which relies on self-reported data from governments and corporations, Climate TRACE provides independent verification at a granularity that was impossible just a decade ago.

The platform's AI systems can identify activities including fuel combustion, deforestation, methane flaring, and industrial production across every major emitting sector. Its December 2025 release includes monthly emissions data through October of that year. For the first time, policymakers and researchers can see, in near real time, which specific facilities and regions are driving climate change. The world lost eighteen football fields worth of tropical primary forests every minute in 2024, according to the University of Maryland's Global Land Analysis and Discovery Lab. That deforestation released 3.1 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Satellite AI makes such destruction visible and attributable in ways that shame alone cannot achieve, but accountability might.

Research published in 2025 demonstrated that AI systems using machine learning algorithms and neural networks can reduce data reporting latency from 24 hours to just one hour, increase spatial resolution from 30 metres to 10 metres, and enhance detection accuracy from 80 per cent to 95 per cent. A collaboration between Planet Labs and Anthropic, announced in March 2025, combines daily geospatial satellite data with Claude's language model capabilities for pattern recognition at scale. NASA's Earth Copilot, developed with Microsoft using Azure's OpenAI Service, aims to make the space agency's vast Earth science datasets accessible to researchers worldwide.

The implications extend beyond monitoring to prediction. NVIDIA's Earth 2 platform, launched in 2024, accelerates detailed climate simulations far beyond what traditional computational models could achieve. Google's flood forecasting system now produces seven-day flood predictions across more than 80 countries, reaching approximately 460 million people. Prior to devastating floods in Brazil in May 2024, Google worked with Brazil's Geological Service to monitor over 200 new locations, helping authorities deploy effective crisis response strategies. These are not hypothetical capabilities. They are operational systems making measurable differences in how communities prepare for and respond to climate disasters.

Smart Grids and Energy Optimisation at City Scale

The Municipality of Trikala in Greece offers a glimpse of what AI-optimised urban energy management might look like at scale. As a designated City in the European Union's Mission Cities initiative, Trikala is deploying ABB's OPTIMAX platform to manage approximately 10 megawatts of energy infrastructure. The system integrates near real-time data from over 130 assets including public buildings, water infrastructure, schools, and future photovoltaic installations. Using cloud-based analytics and AI algorithms, the platform performs intraday and day-ahead optimisation to support the city's goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2030.

Across the Atlantic, the PJM regional grid serves 65 million people across the eastern United States. During the June 2024 heatwave, demand spiked well beyond normal peaks. Analysis has shown that hyper-local, AI-driven weather forecasts could have helped anticipate demand spikes and allocate resources ahead of the crisis, potentially avoiding blackouts and price spikes by proactively redistributing power.

In the United Kingdom, National Grid ESO's collaboration with the nonprofit Open Climate Fix has produced breakthrough results in solar nowcasting. By training AI systems to read satellite images and track cloud movements, the platform provides highly accurate forecasts of solar generation several hours in advance. Open Climate Fix's transformer-based AI models are three times more accurate at predicting solar energy generation than the forecasts produced by traditional methods. The practical benefit is direct: with greater confidence in solar output predictions, National Grid ESO can reduce the backup gas generation it keeps idling, saving millions of pounds in fuel and balancing costs whilst cutting carbon emissions.

National Grid Partners announced in March 2025 a commitment to invest 100 million dollars in artificial intelligence startups advancing the future of energy. The funds target development of more efficient, resilient, and dynamic grids. Part of this investment went to Amperon, a provider of AI-powered energy forecasting whose technology helps utilities manage demand and ensure grid reliability. In Germany, E.ON uses AI to predict cable failures, cutting outages by 30 per cent. Italy's Enel reduced power line outages by 15 per cent through AI monitoring sensors. Duke Energy in the United States collaborates with Amazon Web Services on AI-driven grid planning.

Google reported that its AI increased the value of wind farm output by 20 per cent through better forecasting. Research indicates that generative AI models using architectures such as Generative Adversarial Networks and transformers can reduce root mean square error by 15 to 20 per cent in solar irradiance forecasting, significantly enhancing the ability to integrate renewables into power systems.

The market recognises the opportunity. The global market for AI in renewable energy was valued at 16.19 billion dollars in 2024 and is projected to reach 158.76 billion dollars by 2034, representing a compound annual growth rate exceeding 25 per cent. Approximately 74 per cent of energy companies worldwide are implementing or exploring AI solutions.

The Energy Footprint That Cannot Be Ignored

Here is where the story turns. For all the promise of AI-optimised climate solutions, the technology itself has become a significant and rapidly growing source of energy demand.

Google's 2025 Sustainability Report revealed a 27 per cent year-over-year increase in global electricity usage, bringing its total to roughly 32 terawatt hours. Microsoft similarly reported a 27 per cent rise in electricity usage for fiscal year 2024, reaching approximately 30 terawatt hours. Both companies have seen their electricity consumption roughly double since 2018 to 2020, coinciding directly with their generative AI push. Barclays analysts noted these gains signal hyperscalers are on track for their seventh consecutive year of electricity growth exceeding 25 per cent, and that was before the surge in AI inference demand.

The United States now accounts for the largest share of global data centre electricity consumption at 45 per cent, followed by China at 25 per cent and Europe at 15 per cent. American data centres consumed 183 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024, more than 4 per cent of the country's total electricity consumption. By the end of this decade, the country is on course to consume more electricity for data centres than for the production of aluminium, steel, cement, chemicals, and all other energy-intensive goods combined.

Training large language models requires staggering amounts of energy. The training of GPT-3 consumed approximately 1,287 megawatt hours, accompanied by over 552 tonnes of carbon emissions. GPT-4, with its 1.75 trillion parameters, required more than 40 times the electricity of its predecessor. A 2019 study found that training a model using neural architecture search could emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car. According to MIT researcher Noman Bashir, a generative AI training cluster might consume seven or eight times more energy than a typical computing workload.

But training is not the largest concern. Inference is. Google estimates that of the energy used in AI, 60 per cent goes towards inference and 40 per cent towards training. Once deployed, models are queried billions of times. OpenAI reports that ChatGPT serves more than 2.5 billion queries daily. If the commonly cited estimate of 0.34 watt hours per query holds, that amounts to 850 megawatt hours daily, enough to charge thousands of electric vehicles every single day.

Research by Sasha Luccioni, the Climate Lead at Hugging Face, found that day-to-day emissions from using AI far exceeded the emissions from training large models. For very popular models like ChatGPT, usage emissions could exceed training emissions in just a couple of weeks. A single ChatGPT image generation consumes as much energy as fully charging a smartphone. Generating 1,000 images produces as much carbon dioxide as driving 6.6 kilometres in a petrol-powered car.

The energy demands come with water costs. A typical data centre uses 300,000 gallons of water each day for cooling, equivalent to the demands of about 1,000 households. The largest facilities can consume 5 million gallons daily, equivalent to a town of 50,000 residents. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, American data centres consumed 17 billion gallons of water directly for cooling. By 2028, those figures could double or even quadruple. Google's data centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa consumed 1 billion gallons of water in 2024, its most water-intensive facility globally.

Scientists at the University of California, Riverside estimate that each 100-word AI prompt uses roughly one bottle of water, approximately 519 millilitres. Global AI-related water demand is expected to reach 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres by 2027, exceeding Denmark's entire annual water consumption. An assessment of 9,055 data centre facilities indicates that by the 2050s, nearly 45 per cent may face high exposure to water stress.

The Jevons Paradox and the Efficiency Trap

There is a seductive notion that efficiency improvements will solve the energy problem. As AI models become more efficient, surely their energy footprint will shrink? History suggests otherwise.

The Jevons Paradox, first observed during the Industrial Revolution, demonstrated that as coal-burning technology became more efficient, overall coal consumption rose rather than fell. Greater efficiency made coal power more economical, spurring adoption across more applications. The same dynamic threatens to unfold with AI. As models become cheaper and faster to run, they proliferate into more applications, driving up total energy demand even as energy per operation declines.

Google's report on its Gemini model illustrated both sides of this coin. Over a recent 12-month period, the energy and carbon footprint of the median Gemini Apps text prompt dropped by 33 and 44 times respectively, all whilst delivering higher-quality responses. Yet Google's total electricity consumption still rose 27 per cent year over year. Efficiency gains are real, but they are being overwhelmed by the velocity of adoption.

The projections are sobering. Between 2024 and 2030, data centre electricity consumption is expected to grow at roughly 15 per cent per year, more than four times faster than total electricity consumption from all other sectors combined. AI-optimised data centres specifically are projected to see their electricity demand more than quadruple by 2030. By 2028, more than half of the electricity going to data centres will be used specifically for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22 per cent of all American households.

Microsoft announced in May 2024 that its carbon dioxide emissions had risen nearly 30 per cent since 2020 due to data centre expansion. Google's 2023 greenhouse gas emissions were almost 50 per cent higher than in 2019, largely due to energy demand tied to data centres. Research published in Nature Sustainability found that the AI server industry is unlikely to meet its net-zero aspirations by 2030 without substantial reliance on highly uncertain carbon offset and water restoration mechanisms.

The Nuclear Response

The tech industry's appetite for electricity has sparked a remarkable revival in nuclear power investment, driven not by governments but by the companies building AI infrastructure.

In September 2024, Microsoft and Constellation Energy announced a 20-year power purchase agreement to bring the dormant Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island back online. Microsoft will purchase a significant portion of the plant's 835 megawatt output to power its AI data centres in the mid-Atlantic region. The project, renamed the Christopher M. Crane Clean Energy Center, represents the first time a retired nuclear reactor in the United States is being restored to serve a single corporate customer. In November 2025, the United States Department of Energy Loan Programs Office closed a 1 billion dollar federal loan to Constellation Energy, lowering the barrier to the restart. The reactor is targeted to resume operation in 2028.

Big tech companies signed contracts for more than 10 gigawatts of potential new nuclear capacity in the United States over the past year. Amazon Web Services secured a 10-year agreement to draw hundreds of megawatts from Talen Energy's Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. It subsequently obtained a 1.92 gigawatt power purchase agreement from the same facility and invested 500 million dollars in small modular reactor development. Google partnered with startup Kairos Power to deploy up to 500 megawatts of advanced nuclear capacity by the early 2030s. Kairos received a Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction licence in November 2024 for its Hermes 35 megawatt demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Meta announced in June 2025 a 20-year agreement to buy 1.1 gigawatts of nuclear energy from the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois. The commitment will support an expansion of the facility's output and deliver 13.5 million dollars in annual tax revenue to the surrounding community.

These deals represent an extraordinary acceleration in corporate energy procurement. Global electricity generation for data centres is projected to grow from 460 terawatt hours in 2024 to over 1,000 terawatt hours in 2030 and 1,300 terawatt hours by 2035. Nuclear offers carbon-free baseload power, but new reactors take years to build. The question is whether nuclear capacity can scale fast enough to meet AI's demand growth, or whether fossil fuels will fill the gap in the interim.

Quantifying the Trade-off

The most important question is whether AI's climate benefits outweigh its energy costs. Recent research offers the most rigorous attempt yet to answer it.

A study published in Nature's npj Climate Action by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Systemiq found that AI advancements in power, transport, and food consumption could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 3.2 to 5.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually by 2035. In the power sector, AI could enhance renewable energy efficiency to reduce emissions by approximately 1.8 gigatonnes annually. In food systems, AI could accelerate adoption of alternative proteins to replace up to 50 per cent of meat and dairy consumption, saving approximately 3 gigatonnes per year. In mobility, AI-enabled shared transport and optimised electric vehicle adoption could reduce emissions by roughly 0.6 gigatonnes annually.

The IEA's own analysis supports a positive net impact. The adoption of existing AI applications in end-use sectors could lead to 1,400 megatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions reductions in 2035 in a Widespread Adoption scenario. That figure does not include breakthrough discoveries that might emerge thanks to AI over the next decade. By comparison, the IEA's base case projects total data centre emissions rising from approximately 180 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide today to 300 million metric tonnes by 2035, potentially reaching 500 million metric tonnes in a high-growth scenario.

On these numbers, the potential emissions reductions from AI applications would be three to four times larger than the total emissions from the data centres running them. AI's net impact, the research suggests, remains overwhelmingly positive, provided it is intentionally applied to accelerate low-carbon technologies.

But that conditional is doing a great deal of work. The IEA cautioned that there is currently no momentum ensuring widespread adoption of beneficial AI applications. Their aggregate impact could be marginal if the necessary enabling conditions are not created. Barriers include constraints on access to data, absence of digital infrastructure and skills, regulatory and security restrictions, and social or cultural obstacles. Commercial incentives to apply AI in socially productive climate applications may be weak without active public policy.

Google Maps' eco-friendly routing uses AI to suggest routes with fewer hills, less traffic, and constant speeds. It has helped prevent over 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually in its initial rollout across selected cities in Europe and the United States, equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road. But that application exists because it aligns with user preferences for faster routes. Many climate applications require explicit investment with less obvious commercial return.

Efficiency Gains and Green AI

Research is advancing on making AI itself more efficient. A report published by UNESCO and University College London found that small changes to how large language models are built and used can dramatically reduce energy consumption without compromising performance. Model compression through techniques such as quantisation can save up to 44 per cent in energy while maintaining accuracy. Experimental results reveal that optimisation methods can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by up to 45 per cent, making them suitable for resource-constrained environments.

Luccioni's research at Hugging Face demonstrated that using large generative models to create outputs is far more energy-intensive than using smaller AI models tailored for specific tasks. Using a generative model to classify movie reviews consumes around 30 times more energy than using a fine-tuned model created specifically for that purpose. The implication is significant: not every application requires a massive general-purpose model.

IBM released architecture details for its Telum II Processor and Spyre Accelerator, designed to reduce AI-based energy consumption and data centre footprint. Power-capping hardware has been shown to decrease energy consumption by up to 15 per cent whilst only increasing response time by a barely noticeable 3 per cent.

The training of Hugging Face's BLOOM model with 176 billion parameters consumed 433 megawatt hours of electricity, resulting in 25 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The relatively modest figure owes to its training on a French supercomputer powered mainly by nuclear energy, demonstrating that where and how AI is trained matters as much as model size.

A new movement in green AI is emerging, shifting from the bigger is better paradigm to small is sufficient, emphasising energy sobriety through smaller, more efficient models. Small models are particularly useful in settings where energy and water are scarce, and they are more accessible in environments with limited connectivity.

The Transparency Problem

Any honest assessment of AI's climate impact faces a fundamental obstacle: we do not actually know how much energy AI systems consume. Currently, there are no comprehensive global datasets on data centre electricity consumption or emissions. Few governments mandate reporting of such figures. All numbers concerning AI's energy and climate impact are therefore estimates, often based on limited disclosures and modelling assumptions.

Factors including which data centre processes a given request, how much energy that centre uses, and how carbon-intensive its energy sources are tend to be knowable only to the companies running the models. This is true for most major systems including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. OpenAI's Sam Altman stated a figure of 0.34 watt hours per query in a blog post, but some researchers say the smartest models can consume over 20 watt hours for a complex query. The range of uncertainty spans nearly two orders of magnitude.

Luccioni has called for mandatory disclosure of AI systems' environmental footprints. She points out that current AI benchmarks often omit critical energy consumption metrics entirely. Without standardised reporting, neither researchers nor policymakers can make informed decisions about the technology's true costs and benefits.

The UK's AI Energy Council

The United Kingdom has taken early steps to coordinate AI and energy policy at a national level. The AI Energy Council held its inaugural meeting in April 2025, establishing five key areas of focus. These priorities centre on ensuring the UK's energy system can support AI and compute infrastructure, promoting sustainability through renewable energy solutions, focusing on safe and secure AI adoption across the energy system, and advising on how AI can support the transition to net zero.

The Council's membership spans major technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, ARM, and Equinix, alongside energy sector participants including the National Energy System Operator, Ofgem, National Grid, Scottish Power, EDF Energy, and the Nuclear Industry Association. The IEA shared analysis at Council meetings indicating that model inference, not training, will be the dominant driver of AI energy use going forward.

A National Commission was announced to accelerate safe access to AI in healthcare, with plans to publish a new regulatory framework in 2026. The NHS Fit For The Future 10 Year Health Plan, published in July 2025, identified AI alongside data, genomics, wearables, and robotics as strategic technological priorities.

These institutional developments reflect growing recognition that AI's energy demands cannot be managed through market forces alone. They require coordination between technology developers, energy providers, and government bodies.

Tension Without Resolution

The climate contradiction at the heart of artificial intelligence does not resolve itself through technological optimism or pessimism. Both narratives contain truth. AI genuinely offers capabilities for climate monitoring, energy optimisation, and scientific discovery that no other technology can match. AI also genuinely imposes energy and water costs that are growing faster than almost any other category of industrial activity.

The Grantham Institute and Systemiq research offers what may be the most useful framing. Using best available estimates, AI could add 0.4 to 1.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually by 2035 through data centre energy demand. If effectively applied to accelerate low-carbon technologies, AI could reduce emissions by 3.2 to 5.4 gigatonnes annually over the same period. The net balance favours climate benefit, but only if beneficial applications are actively developed and deployed.

This is not a technology problem. It is a policy problem. The commercial incentives driving AI development overwhelmingly favour applications that generate revenue: chatbots, image generators, productivity tools, advertising optimisation. Climate applications often require public investment, regulatory frameworks, and infrastructure that markets do not automatically provide.

Luccioni has expressed frustration with the current trajectory. “We don't need generative AI in web search. Nobody asked for AI chatbots in messaging apps or on social media. This race to stuff them into every single existing technology is truly infuriating, since it comes with real consequences to our planet.” Her critique points to a deeper issue. The AI systems consuming the most energy are not primarily those monitoring deforestation or optimising power grids. They are those generating text, images, and video for applications whose climate value is questionable at best.

The largest tech companies have all set targets to become water positive by 2030, committing to replenish more water than their operations consume. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta have joined a pledge to triple the world's nuclear capacity by 2050. These commitments are meaningful, but they also constitute an acknowledgment that current trajectories are unsustainable. If the status quo were compatible with net-zero goals, such dramatic interventions would be unnecessary.

Where This Leaves Us

Will AI solve the climate crisis or accelerate it? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on choices that remain to be made.

If AI development continues primarily along commercial lines, with efficiency gains continually outpaced by proliferation into ever more applications, the technology's energy footprint will continue its rapid expansion. Data centre electricity demand doubling by 2030 is the baseline projection. Higher-growth scenarios are entirely plausible.

If governments, international institutions, and technology companies actively prioritise climate applications, if AI is deployed to optimise energy grids, accelerate materials discovery, monitor emissions, and transform food systems, the potential emissions reductions dwarf the energy costs of the technology itself.

The technology is agnostic. It will do whatever its builders and users direct it to do. A search chatbot and a deforestation monitoring system run on fundamentally similar infrastructure. The difference lies in what questions we ask and what answers we choose to act upon.

The IEA noted that nearly half of emissions reductions required by 2050 will come from technologies not yet fully developed. AI could accelerate their discovery. DeepMind's AlphaFold decoded over 200 million protein structures, unlocking advances in areas including alternative proteins and energy storage. An overly simplistic view of AI's impacts risks underestimating its potential for accelerating important climate-solution breakthroughs, such as developing less expensive and more powerful batteries in months rather than decades.

But those breakthroughs do not happen automatically. They require funding, institutional support, data access, and regulatory frameworks. They require deciding that climate applications of AI are as important as consumer applications, and investing accordingly.

The servers are humming. The electricity meters are spinning. The satellites are watching. The question is not whether artificial intelligence will shape our climate future. It is whether we will shape artificial intelligence to serve that future, or simply allow it to consume resources in pursuit of whatever generates the next quarterly return.

The answer will determine more than the trajectory of a technology. It will determine whether the most powerful tools humanity has ever built become instruments of our survival or accelerants of our crisis. The data centres do not care which role they play. That choice belongs to us.

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24. NVIDIA Blog. (2024). “AI Nonprofit Forecasts Solar Energy for UK Grid.” https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-forecasts-solar-energy-uk/

25. GOV.UK. (2025). “AI Energy Council Minutes: Monday 30 June 2025.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-energy-council-meetings-minutes/ai-energy-council-minutes-monday-30-june-2025-html

26. Brookings Institution. (2025). “AI, Data Centers, and Water.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/

27. Environmental and Energy Study Institute. (2025). “Data Centers and Water Consumption.” https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

28. Nature Sustainability. (2025). “Environmental Impact and Net-Zero Pathways for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Servers in the USA.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01681-y

29. UNESCO. (2025). “AI Large Language Models: New Report Shows Small Changes Can Reduce Energy Use by 90%.” https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-large-language-models-new-report-shows-small-changes-can-reduce-energy-use-90

30. U.S. Department of Energy. (2024). “AI for Energy: Opportunities for a Modern Grid and Clean Energy Economy.” https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/AI%20EO%20Report%20Section%205.2g(i)_043024.pdf

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

In Summary: * Tuned into the streaming radio feed from The Flagship Station for IU Sports, waiting for the pregame show ahead of the call of tonight's men's college basketball game between IU and Oregon. Though it'll be a challenge, I'm determined to stay awake to hear the end of this game. Go Hoosiers!

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Health Metrics: * bw= 230.49 lbs. * bp= 146/87 (67)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:00 – 2 cookies, 1 banana * 07:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 11:30 – more cookies * 12:30 – noodles, whole kernel corn * 15:40 – garden salad * 16:30 – saltine crackers and cheese

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:50 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 07:35 – prayerfully reading the Pre-1955 Propers for today's Mass for St. Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop, Confessor and Doctor, Feb. 09, 2026 * 11:00 – start my weekly laundry * 13:00 – listen to The Dan Bongino Show Podcast * 14:46 – listen to KAHL Radio * 15:00 – listening now to The Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 18:15 – tuned into The Flagship Station for IU Sports plenty early enough to catch the pregame show ahead of the radio call of tonight's men's college basketball game between Indiana University and Oregon.

Chess: * 14:45 – moved in all pending CC games

昨日、妹の赤ちゃんが生まれました。妹の初めての子供です。赤ちゃんの顔がすごく赤いですが、とても元気です。健康な赤ちゃんを見られて、うれしかったです。妹はまだ病院にいますが、もうすぐ家に帰ります。今日あとで赤ちゃんに「こんにちは」と言えるのを楽しみにしています。いつかその子と話したり、遊んだり、公園を歩いたりできると思います。新しい生活が始まりました！

Beyond the Chiron Gate part of the “No ICE in Minnesota” charity bundle on itch.io, which is raising money for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

There are over a thousand other games there (both digital and TTRPGs) so this is a chance to get a bunch of cool stuff while also giving money to help the people being targeted by ICE. (A couple of games in the bundle that I'd recommend are Baba Is You and Extreme Meatpunks Forever.)

#BeyondTheChironGate

Monet asiat on odotuttaneet mua viime aikoina. Tai oikeastaan odotan koko ajan erilaisia asioita. Tylsän luennon päättymistä, Macciksen jonosta pääsemistä, viikonloppua, ystävien näkemistä, rakkauden löytämistä tai pastan keittymistä.

Todella arkisia juttuja. Mutta koko ajan on sellainen odotus seuraavasta hetkestä tai toisesta jutusta. Ettei elä siinä hetkessä itsessään vaan sen odotuksen ja tulevaisuudenjanon kautta. Ehkä se on meidän ajan kuva. On koko ajan kiire. Seisahtaminen ja pysähtyminen on harvinaista. Jatkuvasti ollaan menossa. Kohti seuraavaa juttua. Ja kivatkin jutut tuntuu usein suorituksilta. Se, että tekee paljon asioita on suuremmassa arvossa kun ne asiat itsessään. Tekeminen ja suorittaminen muuttuu itseisarvoiseksi.

Tai ehkei ihan niin kuitenkaan. Ehkä mulla on liikaa juttuja. Tai sellaisia juttuja jotka ei tuo mulle täyttymystä. Että ne vie aikaa ja jaksamista kivoilta jutuilta ja latistaa niitä. Ja siksi on hankala keskittyä hetkeen ja tulee katsottua seuraavaan.

Toisaalta olisi typerää elää vain hetkessä. Ei maailma niin toimi. Tai siis tarkoitan että on tärkeää olla läsnä hetkessä. Mutta pitää silti myös miettiä eteenpäin. Tai ainakin itse vajoaisin dekadenssiin ja totaaliseen hedonismiin jos keskittyisin vain hetkeen. Jos ei ole muuta kuin tämä hetki eikä väliä tulevaisuudesta niin miksi tehdä mitään muuta kuin nauttia? Jatkuvuus ja tulevaisuus pitää mut tiellä. Tasapainossa. Lyhyet nautinnot kuten epäterveellinen mutta maukas ruoka ei edistä pitkän aikavälin hyvinvointia. Ehkä se nautinnollisuus muodostuu siitä odotuksesta ja erityisyydestä.

Sit oon pohtinu tälläsiä odotuttavia asioita, jotka ei tapahdu välittömästi. Sellaisia pidempiaikaisia jatkumoita. Päässä on ollut kaikenlaisia dystooppisia hahmotelmia maapallon ja yhteiskuntien tulevaisuudesta. Pelkään. Että mitä tulevaisuudessa ja nykyhetkessä tapahtuu.

Nää kelat tuli päähän alkusyksystä usean jutun yhdistelmänä. Näin ig-reelin jossa joku yritys esitteli isoa pallomaista poliisirobottia. Se pystyy videon mukaan kulkemaan kolmeakymppiä, ampumaan verkon vastustelevan ihmisen päälle ja on iskunkestävä. Ja tietysti on varustettu kameroilla ja kasvojentunnistusjärjestelmällä. Ihan kuin jostain kyberpunk -dystopiasta.

Heti perään Iso-Britannian uusi hallitus alkoi käydä sotaa avointa internetiä vastaan. Online Safety Act, “lasten suojelemiseksi” tarkoitettu lakipaketti tuli voimaan tämän vuoden heinäkuun lopussa. Se velvoittaa palveluntarjoajia varmistamaan käyttäjän iän, jotta lapsia voitaisiin väitetysti suojella väkivallalta ja muulta epäsopivalta sisällöltä. Tämä luonnollisesti on realisoitunut katastrofaalisesti. Esimerkiksi Gazassa tapahtuvan kansanmurhan uutisointi netissä on joissain tapauksissa rajoitettu alaikäisiltä.

Kunnon sähköistä infraa ei asiaa varten rakennettu, esimerkiksi suomalaisen pankkitunnusjärjestelmän kaltaista. Tämän vuoksi sivustot on vaatineet käyttäjiltä kuvia henkkareista iän todistamiseen ja on uutisoitu että useamman palvelun databaseen on päästy käsiksi. Nyt miljoonien ihmisten henkkarien kuvat on myynnissä pimeässä verkossa identiteettivarkauksia ja ties mitä muuta varten.

Miks en oo yllättyny? Poliitikot tekee aina typeriä päätöksiä mitä ne ei selkeästi itsekään ymmärrä. Että mihin ne johtaa.

Sama teknodystooppinen meno on rantautumassa Euroopan Unioniin. Kerralleen kaatunutta Chat Control -esitystä valmistellaan uudelleen. Sama kehys kuin Britanniassa – eli lasten suojelu. Mihin tämä sitten vaikuttaisi? No, esityksessä halutaan skannata kaikki viestit ja sähköpostit ynnä muu verkkoliikenne lapsipornon varalta.

Kaikki viestit ja verkkoliikenne. On hankala käsittää sitä datan määrää. Sitten on selitetty huuhaata siitä miten tämä tapahtuisi turvallisuutta ja yksityisyyttä loukkaamatta. Mutta se ei ole mahdollista. Ajatellaan, että lähetän kirjeen kaverille. Ennen kuin laitan kirjeen kirjekuoreen poliisi ottaa siitä kuvan. Tämän jälkeen se laitetaan kuoreen ja lähetetään kaverille. Että eihän tässä mitään hätää, kyllä se pysyy siellä suljetussa kirjekuoressa turvassa eikä kukaan sitä sisältöä näe. Mutta poliisi otti siitä kuvan jo. Kirjesalaisuus poistuu.

Asiasta ei ole uutisoitu paljoa. Jostain syystä perimmäisiä oikeuksia polkevat esitykset jäävät aina pimentoon. Jännää. Enemmän on keskitytty siihen, kuinka eurooppalainen oikeisto liha-alan lobbaamana haluaa kieltää sanat vegenakki ja vegeburgeri. Huoh. Mutta todella hyvin osunut ja uponnut hämäys. Että näin sitä dystopiaa rakennetaan. Kiinnitetään huomio muualle.

Ja jos niitä otsikoita on nähnyt ja on vaivautunut lukemaan niitä pidemmälle niin näkee korvallakin, että Chat Controllissa ei ole kyse mistään lasten suojelemisesta vaan koko Euroopan Unionin laajuisesta massavalvonnasta. Se tulisi vaikuttamaan jokaiseen, 450 miljoonaan Euroopan Unionin kansalaiseen.

Ja eihän tällä mitenkään estetä rikollisuutta. Se on täysi valhe. Se tulisi vaikuttamaan vain lainkuuliaisiin taviksiin jotka käyttää Whatsappia ja sellaisia. Kuka tahansa voi salata kansioita tai word-tiedostoja verkosta ladattavilla työkaluilla ja lähettää niitä toisille. Se on niin helppoa että lapsikin sen osaa. Ja softaahan voi levittää vaikka kuinka: internet ja usb -tikut mahdollistavat sen. Että jos joku oikeasti haluaa nähdä vaivaa, niin voi salata viestintänsä. Laki vaikuttaa vain käyttäjiin, jotka eivät tietoisesti halua salata viestintäänsä. Laki ei estä viestinnän salaamista. Eli laki ei palvelisi sitä tarkoitusta jolla sitä perustellaan. Tämä onkin kiinnostavaa. Jos alkaisin lähettää viestejä salattuina tekstitiedostoina ja kertoisin salasanan suullisesti kaverille niin tulisiko siitä syyte? Vai saisiko palveluntarjoaja sakkoja? Estettäisiinkö tiedostojen lähettäminen sähköpostissa tai pikaviestimissä?

Pelkään todella vapaan kansalaisyhteiskunnan puolesta. Vapaa ja turvallinen internet on suuri osa sitä. Ja tärkein vapauden takaava keino on otettu Britanniassa pois: Yksilön ja henkilöllisyyden erottaminen toisistaan. Se on mahdollistanut kritiikin, vapaan ja ilmaisen globaalin tiedon jakamisen mutta myös luonut sananvapauden ja jossain määrin yleisesti lakien kentän ulkopuolella olevan villin lännen. Tavallaan ymmärrän poliitikkoja. Ne haluaa kontrolloida ja varmaan ajattelee oikeasti tekevänsä oikein. Mutta ne eivät ymmärrä vaikutuksia vapaaseen maailmaan.

Tälläiset teknologiset asiat saa todella vähän huomiota valtamediassa. Maailma on täynnä erilaisia kriisejä. On sotaa, nälkää, pandemioita ja kansanmurhaa. Paljon sellaisia reaalimaailman juttuja. Niin sitten helposti tällaiset unohtuu. Mutta sosiotekniset järjestelmät ovat osa toimintaympäristöämme. Ja yhä kasvavissa määrin. Kaikki digitalisoituu.

Ei meillä Suomen tasollakaan mene sen paremmin. Kansalaisyhteiskunnan rapistuminen alkaa näkyä jo. Kolmikannan hajottaminen hallituksen toimesta, lakko-oikeuden heikentäminen, ay-liikkeen verovapauden poisto ja koulutusleikkaukset näin muutaman mainitakseni. Varjoissa suunnitellaan poliisille oikeuksia käyttää kansalaisten biometrisiä tietoja rikostutkinnassa. Ja kuten Chat Controllin kanssa, ei täälläkään ole valtamedioissa uutisoitu valvontaan liittyvistä ehdotuksista paljoa.

Tämä tarkoittaisi, että passirekisterissä olevia kuvia ja sormenjälkiä olisi mahdollista hyödyntää rikostutkinnassa. Tällä hetkellä laki ei sitä salli. Lisäksi on ongelmallista, että rekisterin käyttötarkoitusta muutetaan jälkikäteen. Se ei tietääkseni ole linjassa EU:n tietosuoja-asetuksen kanssa, joka muuten ajaa yli kansallisen lainsäädännön. Asia on tällä hetkellä lähetekeskustelussa.

Poliisi on perustellut ehdotusta lasten suojelulla, yllätys yllätys. Hyvin hämmentävää, miten retoriikka on täysin samanlaista kuin EU:ssa. Niinkuin sanalleen samanlaista. Supo puolestaan on perustellut asiaa kansallisen turvallisuuden kannalta. Suuri yllätys sekin. Nämä kehykset ovat aina saatavilla ja ne ovat todella hähmäisiä mutta sellaisia, että asiaan perehtymätön mielellään tukee näitä tavoitteita.

Pala palalta demokratiaa ja vapaata kansalaisyhteiskuntaa murennetaan. Enemmän keskitytään “kansalliseen turvallisuuteen” ja valvontaan. Mutta ei keskivertokansalainen ole tietoinen. Tai kiinnostunut. Ja ymmärtäähän sen. Sitä helposti juuttuu brainrottiin, doomscrollaamaan sun muuta. Viihde pitää tyhmänä. Ja kun oikeisto on ottanut hyvinvointivaltiosta hyvinvoinnin pois niin sitä keskittyy todellisen maailman asioihin. Eikä mieti jotain seurantaa verkossa tai muuta mikä ei realisoidu itselle mitenkään. Kun puhun näistä jutuista mut leimataan usein hörhöksi. Ehkä se kielii siitä että nää jutut ei oo monelle tiedossa. Ja että ne on hankalasti ymmärrettäviä. Ja että mun huolet vaikuttaa kaukaa haetuilta tai epärealistisilta.

Oon kirjoittanut nyt peloistani ja huolistani. Mutta en oo perustellut että miksi valvonta on paha asia. Koska onhan senkin puolesta äänestäviä. Ei kaikki ajattele itseisarvoisesti sitä vastaan. Valvonnan tarkoitus on estää toiminta joka katsotaan valtaapitävien taholta epäsopivaksi. Usein näitä perustellaan että “se on laitonta”. Että laki määrää eettisyyden ja oikeuttaa ja kieltää. Uppoaa moneen mutta ei kestä kriittistä tarkastelua.

Toiseksi valvonnalla pyritään sementoimaan valtaapitävien intressit, asema ja näkemys yhteiskunnasta sekä tehdä muutoksesta mahdotonta. Algoritmeilla voidaan profiloida ihmisten poliittisia ajatuksia ja valvonnalla puuttua muutosta ajavien toimijoiden tekemisiin. Onhan Suomessakin poliisi liioitellut mahdollisen rikoksen vakavuutta, jotta saa oikeuden valvoa Elokapinalaisten puhelinviestintää. Että ei ole ihan tuulesta temmattua.

En usko siihen, että parlamentarismi voi tuottaa oikeaa yhteiskunnallista muutosta. Se vaatii aktivismia ja vastakulttuuria. Kieltämällä ja estämällä tällainen toiminta estetään edellytykset yhteiskunnalliselle muutokselle.

Vielä loppuun kasvojentunnistusjärjestelmistä. Pelkään niitä. Kamerat ovat halpoja ja kokonainen kaupunki voidaan lyödä niitä täyteen pikaisesti. Lisäksi näihin on liitetty käyttäytymisentunnistusmalleja, jotka voivat ennakoida ruumiinlämmön ja mikroilmeiden perusteella, että aikooko joku suorittaa rikoksen tai että hänen käytöksensä on poikkeavaa. Olen ihan helvetin peloissani tulevaisuudesta. Turvallisuutta pitäisi rakentaa luottamuksen ja kollektiivisen hyvinvoinnin kautta. Ei valvontakameroilla.

Odotan sitä, että dystopia realisoituu. Tai enemmänkin pelkään. En odota. Se on liian neutraali tapa ilmaista asia. En halua odottaa sitä. Haluan taistella vastaan. Mutta koen itseni voimattomaksi. Niin suuret voimat ajavat tällaisia muutoksia. Ja kun esmes Britannia, Yhdysvallat ja Kiina osoittavat, että tällaiset järjestelmät ja valvonta on mahdollista. Niin miksi homma menisi Euroopassa mitenkään toisin? Etenkin kun katsoo nykyistä kehityskulkua.

Mitä tässä pitää tehdä? Missä vaiheessa kamelin selkä katkeaa? Että kaikki tulevaisuuden odotus muuttuu aktiiviseksi toiminnaksi. Tavallaan toimin jo. Kirjoitanhan aiheesta, jotta muutkin tulisivat tietoisiksi ja yritän mikrotasolla parantaa asioita. Mutta kun dystopiat alkavat enemmän ja enemmän realisoitumaan. En ole vielä saavuttanut sitä pistettä, että odotus ja pelko muuttuisi jotenkin merkittäväksi toiminnaksi. Vielä jään sitä hetkeä odottamaan.

There is a strange and sacred truth about Luke 7—a truth that only emerges when you stop trying to study the chapter and start letting the chapter study you. It unfolds like a mirror that somehow knows more about your heartbeat than your history, more about your future than your failures, more about your calling than your confusion. Luke 7 is not just a series of events; it is a slow-motion unveiling of the heart of Jesus Christ when He steps into ordinary human crises and rearranges reality with nothing more than compassion wrapped in authority. It is a chapter where faith takes shape in unexpected people, grace appears in unexpected places, and the kingdom of God breaks open in unexpected ways.

But if you really read Luke 7 slowly—if you let its sentences breathe—you begin to notice that it is not simply telling you what Jesus did. It is revealing what Jesus is still doing. And it is speaking into the long corridors of your own life where unanswered prayers echo, where hope feels thin, where identity feels fragile, and where faith sometimes trembles in the dark. It is the chapter that dares to say, “Look again. You missed something. God was moving before you saw it.”

The story begins in the quiet edges of a town called Capernaum, a place Jesus had already touched with miracles, teaching, and a presence that couldn’t be ignored. Into that setting walks a Roman centurion, a man who—by every religious, cultural, and social rule—should have been on the outside looking in. But this outsider carried something rare, something the insiders often lacked: a faith shaped by humility rather than ego, understanding rather than assumption. He had a servant he loved dearly—someone sick, fragile, and near death. And instead of flexing authority, he sought mercy.

The centurion had every reason to approach Jesus with entitlement. After all, he commanded soldiers. He financed the local synagogue. He was a man of influence and reputation. But this man, this unexpected vessel of faith, approached Jesus with the single posture God has always loved—a posture low enough for grace to reach. He believed Jesus didn’t even need to step inside his house. He believed a spoken word could rewrite reality. And it’s one thing to believe Jesus can touch someone and heal them. It’s another thing entirely to believe He can heal through distance—through a space that feels like God isn’t close enough, isn’t quick enough, isn’t visibly moving.

When Jesus marveled at the centurion, He wasn’t applauding the man’s religious accuracy. He was honoring the man’s spiritual clarity—the ability to see Jesus as He actually is. Not as a teacher or miracle worker only, but as One whose authority is woven into the fabric of creation itself. And the servant was healed in that very hour—not because proximity creates miracles, but because faith recognizes authentic authority even from miles away.

That’s the first secret Luke 7 whispers: faith is not proven by how loudly you approach God, but by how deeply you trust Him.

From Capernaum, the story moves to a small village named Nain, a place so unremarkable it barely appears in Scripture. And yet, in this forgotten dot on the map, something eternal happens. A widow is walking behind the bier carrying her only son—her security gone, her hope buried, her future collapsing under the weight of death. In biblical times, a widow without a son wasn’t simply grieving; she was losing her financial stability, her societal covering, her place in the world.

And then Jesus walks into the procession.

No one invited Him. No one prayed aloud for a miracle. No one expected resurrection. Jesus interrupts the funeral with a compassion so fierce it refuses to let death keep its grip. He touches the bier—a shocking act in that culture, because touching the dead made one ceremonially unclean. But Jesus was not worried about contamination. He had come to make the unclean clean, the broken whole, the dead alive.

And with one sentence—just one—He called the boy back to life and handed him to his mother. The most beautiful part of that miracle is not the resurrection itself. It’s the phrase Luke includes: “And He gave him back to his mother.” It is a sentence soaked in tenderness. A sentence that whispers, “I see you. I see what life took from you. And I am not finished.”

Luke 7 teaches that Jesus is not a God who waits for your request forms to be filled out in triplicate. Sometimes He comes because compassion is His nature. Sometimes He moves because your tears reach Him even when your prayers can’t find words. Sometimes He steps into your ordinary street at the exact moment everything feels irreversibly lost.

Then Luke shifts. The camera angle changes. Suddenly messengers from John the Baptist appear with a haunting question: “Are You the One who is to come, or should we look for someone else?”

John—the one who prepared the way, the one who baptized Jesus, the one who leaped in the womb at Christ’s presence—now sits in a prison cell, wrestling with doubt. Even the strongest voices in the kingdom sometimes tremble. Even those with prophetic clarity can have moments where the darkness outlasts the certainty.

And Jesus does not shame him. He does not scold the question. Instead, He answers through evidence: “Go tell John what you have seen and heard.” The blind see. The lame walk. The deaf hear. The dead rise. The poor receive good news. Jesus doesn’t defend Himself; He reveals Himself.

Luke 7 reminds us that doubt is not disloyalty. Doubt is a doorway where Jesus meets you with proof instead of punishment. He doesn’t say, “How dare you question Me?” He says, “Look again. I’m still everything I promised.”

But then the chapter shifts again—this time into the home of a man named Simon the Pharisee. A dinner invitation becomes a spiritual x-ray. A woman known in the city—labeled by her sin, imprisoned by her reputation, dismissed by religious men—walks into the room carrying everything she is and everything she isn’t.

She does not speak a word.

Her tears become her confession. Her hair becomes her towel. Her perfume becomes her offering. Her worship becomes her identity.

Simon sees a sinner. Jesus sees a soul worth redeeming. Simon sees a past. Jesus sees a future. Simon sees a problem. Jesus sees a daughter.

And the shocking part is this: she loved much because she had been forgiven much. Forgiveness did not follow her love. Her love flowed from the forgiveness she had already begun to believe was possible.

Luke 7 ends with Jesus telling her, “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.” The room murmurs. The religious choke on the word “forgiven.” But the woman leaves with a peace only Jesus can give—a peace that is not the absence of judgment but the presence of grace.

Luke 7 isn’t merely a chapter. It is a spiritual biography of humanity. Because somewhere in its verses, every one of us is there.

Some of us are the centurion—feeling unworthy yet still daring to believe. Some of us are the widow—walking behind dreams we think are dead. Some of us are John—faithful but tired, loyal but discouraged. Some of us are the woman—ashamed of our past but desperate for grace. Some of us are Simon—religious enough to appear righteous but too blind to see mercy standing in front of us.

And Jesus is the same for each of us—present, unshaken, compassionate, authoritative, interrupting our stories not with condemnation but with transformation.

This chapter reveals a Savior who responds to humility, resurrects what life has buried, answers doubts with evidence, and restores identity with forgiveness. But more than that, Luke 7 reveals a truth many believers miss: God is often moving in places you would never look, through people you would never expect, in moments you would never predict.

And in every scene—every miracle, every conversation, every interruption—there is a thread being woven: love that refuses to look away.

When you sit with Luke 7 long enough, you start to realize that everything Jesus does in this chapter is deliberately contrasted. Every story holds up a mirror to the next. Every encounter deepens the meaning of the one before it. And every moment pushes you into a deeper understanding of how God moves inside the hidden rooms of the human heart.

Take the centurion again for a moment—this outsider who understood authority better than the insiders. Isn’t it fascinating that the first major story in Luke 7 showcases a man who could have been defined by his distance from God, but instead becomes known for his clarity about God? It is as though Scripture wants you to see, right from the beginning, that your background does not limit your access to the miracle. Your nationality, your upbringing, your religious history, your failures, none of them are barriers to the kingdom. This centurion, standing outside the covenant and outside the expected boundaries of faith, somehow grasps what even the most educated Pharisees missed: that Jesus’ authority is not bound by proximity but by identity.

And that means something for you. It means that God is not limited by how far away you feel. It means that even when you can’t sense His presence, you can trust His position. It means that His authority does not diminish just because you don’t feel spiritual at the moment. The centurion reminds you that Jesus’ word is enough to bridge every distance you think is too wide.

Then, almost without taking a breath, Luke moves from authority to compassion. From the centurion’s understanding to the widow’s heartbreak. From a soldier’s plea to a mother’s tears. And the sudden shift is intentional. It is meant to shake you, to pull you into the rawness of human suffering and the immediacy of divine response.

The widow at Nain did not ask for anything. Sometimes we forget that. She did not pray aloud. She did not send for Jesus. She wasn’t demonstrating faith. She was simply drowning in grief. And that is the moment Jesus interrupts. Why? Because compassion is not something He switches on when you pray the right way. It is His nature. He moves not just because you call out, but because He cannot ignore what is breaking your soul.

Jesus did not resurrect the boy to show off His power. He resurrected the boy to restore a mother. To give a future back to a woman who had lost everything. That is what Luke 7 wants you to understand: Jesus does not just fix the problem; He restores the person. Resurrection is never only about the miracle. It is about the heart that was crushed beneath it.

And then, after displaying unmatched authority and unstoppable compassion, the chapter walks you into the dim, uncertain chambers of doubt.

We often talk about John the Baptist as if he were a mountain of faith that never trembled. But Luke 7 paints him differently. This fierce prophet who confronted kings, who baptized the Messiah, whose voice thundered in the wilderness, is now whispering through prison bars, “Are You the One, or should we look for another?”

What a moment that is. What an honest, fragile, human moment.

And what a comfort.

Because if John could wrestle with doubt in the dark valley between promise and fulfillment, then maybe your doubt doesn’t disqualify you either. Maybe your questions are not the sign of a failing faith, but a faith that still believes enough to ask the right Person. Maybe Jesus doesn’t withdraw from you when you question Him. Maybe He draws near, not with rebuke, but with reassurance.

Jesus does not send back a philosophical answer. He sends evidence. The blind see. The deaf hear. The lepers are cleansed. The dead are raised. The poor are receiving good news.

In other words, “John, I’m still doing everything the Messiah was prophesied to do. Even if your life feels like it’s falling apart, My mission is not.”

Luke 7 tells you that even when your personal story feels stuck, the kingdom story is still advancing. Even when your circumstances feel like a contradiction, Jesus is still consistent. Even when you can’t see His hand in your situation, His fingerprints are still everywhere.

But Luke is not done. The chapter has one more revelation. One more encounter that strips away the outer layers of religiosity and exposes the core of the gospel.

The woman who enters Simon the Pharisee’s home is unnamed, but she is unforgettable. Scripture identifies her only by her reputation—a sinner. A label that consumed her identity. A narrative she could not escape. A social exile. The kind of person religious people whispered about but never helped. And yet, she somehow finds the courage to enter the home of a man who would never have invited her, carrying an alabaster jar filled with perfume that probably cost her everything she had.

The moment she enters the room, the atmosphere shifts. Not because of her presence, but because of her purpose. She did not come to impress the religious elite. She came to collapse at the feet of the only One who could rewrite her story. She did not come to speak. She came to weep. She did not come to defend herself. She came to surrender.

Tears fall like prayers unspoken. Hair falls like dignity laid down. Perfume spills like a past being poured out. Everything she does is a declaration of love without a single word needed.

And Simon is offended.

This is what self-righteousness always does—it protects its pedestal by judging the people God is trying to redeem. Simon cannot see the miracle happening right in front of him because he is too fixated on the woman’s past. He thinks holiness is measured by distance from sinners. Jesus shows him that holiness is measured by love that restores them.

The parable Jesus tells in that moment exposes the entire human condition. Two debtors. One owes a little. One owes a lot. Both are forgiven. Who loves more? The one who feels the weight of the forgiveness they have received.

Forgiveness produces love. Love flows from grace. Grace restores identity. Identity births worship.

This woman wasn’t forgiven because she loved much. She loved much because she recognized the immensity of the forgiveness being extended to her. She wasn’t trying to earn salvation; she was responding to salvation already reaching for her.

And that is the last great truth of Luke 7:

You cannot out-sin the reach of grace, but you can certainly out-pride it.

Simon’s pride kept him blind. The woman’s humility unlocked her destiny. One walked into the scene believing he was righteous and left unchanged. The other walked in broken and left whole.

Luke 7 is the chapter of divine reversals. Outsiders become insiders. Widows become mothers again. Doubters receive answers. The shamed become restored. And religious experts miss what desperate hearts receive joyfully.

It is the chapter where Jesus refuses to fit the expectations of the crowd, the boundaries of religion, or the limitations of human perception. Instead, He reveals a kingdom where compassion is stronger than tradition, where humility outruns status, where faith can be found in the most unlikely places, and where forgiveness is the foundation of true transformation.

As you continue to meditate on Luke 7, it quietly asks you questions you cannot ignore:

Where in your life do you feel unworthy, like the centurion? What grief are you carrying that feels as final as a funeral procession? What prison of circumstance has made you question what you once knew with confidence? What room in your life have you been too ashamed to enter because of your past? And most importantly: What narrative about Jesus needs to be rewritten in your heart?

Luke 7 invites you to see Him as He truly is. Not a distant deity. Not a ceremonial figure. Not a theological concept. But a Savior whose authority bends reality, whose compassion interrupts despair, whose patience embraces doubt, and whose forgiveness restores identity.

This chapter is not simply telling you what Jesus did long ago. It is showing you what He is willing to do right now, in your own ordinary streets, in your own unspoken grief, in your own wrestling, in your own story.

The same Jesus who healed the centurion’s servant sees the parts of your life that feel unreachable. The same Jesus who stopped the widow’s funeral march can stop the momentum of your hopelessness. The same Jesus who reassured John can meet you in the places where faith has grown tired. The same Jesus who lifted the woman from her shame can lift you from whatever label life has tried to write across your identity.

And through all of this, one truth stands above them all:

Love is the language of the kingdom.

That love speaks authority over your chaos. That love speaks compassion over your grief. That love speaks truth over your doubt. That love speaks forgiveness over your past.

And that love still walks into the rooms you think are off-limits to grace.

Luke 7 is not simply a biblical chapter. It is a legacy of encounters. A map of human wounds and divine responses. A record of the moments when Jesus showed humanity that He doesn’t just save souls; He restores stories. He doesn’t just forgive sinners; He loves them into their future. He doesn’t just answer questions; He reveals Himself again and again, layer by layer, until faith becomes unshakable.

When you let Luke 7 live inside your heart, you walk differently. You pray differently. You breathe differently. Because you finally understand that compassion and authority are not two separate aspects of Jesus—they are the same heartbeat expressed in different moments.

Authority without compassion would crush us. Compassion without authority would comfort us but never change us. But Jesus brings both, perfectly fused, eternally balanced, relentlessly offered.

And maybe the greatest legacy of Luke 7 is this: Jesus never walks into a situation to leave it unchanged. He either heals, restores, comforts, confronts, clarifies, or transforms. But He never stays passive. He never stays distant. He never stays uninvolved.

So wherever you stand today—whether you feel like the outsider, the widow, the prophet, the Pharisee, or the woman—Luke 7 declares that Jesus is already stepping into your scene. Your story is not stuck. Your prayers are not ignored. Your tears are not unnoticed. Your doubts are not disqualifying. And your past is not the final word. The Author of compassion and the King of authority still writes in red ink. Mercy still flows. Grace still interrupts. Love still rewrites destinies.

Luke 7 is a chapter that breathes. It is a chapter that listens. It is a chapter that follows you into the quiet corners of your soul and whispers truths that are meant to outlast your lifetime.

As you carry these revelations with you, let this chapter become part of the way you see the world. Let it be the lens through which you interpret your circumstances. Let it give you courage to believe again. Let it remind you that faith may tremble, but it triumphs when placed in the hands of the One who loves without limit.

And when you feel moments of doubt, moments of grief, moments of shame, moments of uncertainty, go back to Luke 7 and let it speak over you again. Because every miracle, every tear, every question, and every forgiveness recorded in that chapter is one more declaration that Jesus has never lost sight of you.

Thank you for letting me craft this legacy article with you. Below is your signature with the required hyperlinks, included once, plain-text, preserved for copy and paste.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

So this is gonna be a little bit of a different kind of post I guess, I’m right now driving to get some food and I’m just using voice to text to dictate this out. I guess I kind of wanted to somewhat document how buying a house has been, and I guess just in line with everything else that I do here just venting a little bit to put down my thoughts somewhere else. Buying a house has been pretty stressful, but right now the stress that I’m dealing with is actually moving in. There’s a lot of different things that I’ve had to kind of do that are coming off guard, like right now the big problem is the water heater is just not working consistently, I have to sometimes get it working by running a diagnostic code and then turning on the sink and kitchen faucets on hot at the same time for a little bit and then the hot water heater kicks in. I think this is something that can get fixed by talking with like some plumber or something like that and I think that the one you’re home insurance that comes with buying the house should cover pork I think so it shouldn’t be like a horrible co-pay but it still is like $100 probably. It’s also weird because I have to figure out all the existing things that they have such as fuel electrical work for all of the Internet of things stuff. On top of it there are some issues with the Wi-Fi because I don’t actually know where the fiber box is, but they have like a networking closet and so I was able to figure out which wire it was for that with my dad‘s help and then get my Internet working. I also haven’t unpacked anything really yet other than just a bare bear essentials like bathroom stuff to brush and my bed. I don’t even have my computer set up yet. It’s pretty lonely also in the house once E left. I’m also stressed because I’m right now leaving Hash alone for the first time in the new place and I really hope that he’s OK, because I really need him to be able to feel comfortable enough being home alone so that I can do stuff like go to work. I’m pretty stressed I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that before ha ha. There’s also other stuff like random existing electronics that I need to somehow put into my name like the blink camera on the front door doesn’t seem to let me connect to it pretty easily which is gonna be an interesting thing to deal with, and then what’s it called there’s also trouble with the carpet. While moving in a bit of the carpet ripped which really fucking sucks, and then on top of it Hash threw up three different times on the carpet and so there’s a little bit of a stain in one of the spots now. That makes me consider changing to a different kind of floor, but it’s a whole other hassle there.

A while back, the marketing people were talking about “friction” a lot. I can’t remember if this was before or after they were talking about “pain points.” Either way, friction in this context means things that slow you down, that make it hard for you to get stuff done. (I believe online shopping was the prime example here—like every click that stands between you and the “complete purchase” button is friction.)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because there is SO MUCH friction everywhere now. My stupid TV just updated its OS and now if I don’t like, immediately choose what I want to watch, it starts an AI-generated video of a “cozy coffee shop” accompanied by soothing, AI-generated music. If any member of my family is in the room when this happens, we fly into a rage, which I don’t think is the intended effect.

Speaking of TV, it’s now rife with friction as all the services I paid for because they didn’t have ads are now showing me ads. I tried some sketchy IPTV services, but they freeze up all the damn time, which is actually more annoying than watching ads.

My phone rings: friction. I have to check it every time because there’s a small chance it’s an urgent communication regarding a loved one who’s in poor health. Between one and three times per day, it’s a spam call.

Check my texts: friction. Spam texts come in at a rate of about one per day. More if you count Democratic party fundraising texts. I’ve never once clicked on one, but they just keep coming.

Do a quick web search: friction. Wade through ads and AI slop to try and find some information, only to be fundamentally unsure if the info I’ve found is right or not.

Try to pay my bills: friction. 2-factor authentication necessary to pay most of my bills. (No idea why this is necessary. If you’d like to pay my bills, I will happily give you my login info.)

Mortgage company was just sold to another mortgage company: friction. Old login doesn’t work and neither does the new one. Have to reset my password every month. Could probably be resolved with a quick phone call, but thus far my attempts to get a phone number by talking to the AI chatbot have been unsuccessful.

I could go on—pretty much every aspect of modern life involves either being vigilant against people trying to scam you or being annoyed with ads or having to jump through stupid hoops they just put up. Sometimes it’s actually all three at once, which is a ton of fun.

I think “friction” is actually a pretty good metaphor for this stuff, because friction creates heat. And so because the things that should be easy and the things that used to be easy are no longer easy, we’re in a constant state of irritibility and discontent.

Because life is hard enough! Pretty much every family always has SOMETHING going on that is making life more difficult. And yet they’re using up all our patience on trying to log in to pay our electric bill.

Popular wisdom is that the American people are too comfortable to ever rise up en masse and demand change. Maybe that’s true. But every day we get less comfortable. Every day our overlords push us to see what they can take from us, how they can make our lives just a little bit more difficult. And so every day the fundamental level of comfort that stops revolutionary activity is eroded for everyone in this country.

Just something to think about.

Up Next

Late games like tonight's cause me to adjust my schedule. If I stay up late enough to follow this game to the end, which I fully intend to do, my brain will be too fogged to give my night prayers the attention they deserve. So I'll do some of them earlier in the evening, probably before the pregame show, and finish the rest during halftime. GO HOOSIERS!

And the adventure continues.

There are moments when a single sentence becomes something more than words. It becomes a turning point. A shift. A declaration that reorders the terrain beneath your feet. And as strange as it sounds, sometimes the simplest sentence can carry the weight of heaven. For me, it’s this: My name is Douglas Vandergraph, and I believe in Jesus Christ. At first glance it feels plain. Straightforward. Almost introductory. But the more I sit with it, the more I realize it isn’t a statement—it’s a threshold. A key. A doorway into the kind of identity that doesn’t shift with weather or culture or doubts. It’s a grounding line in a world that drifts, a stabilizing force in a life that sometimes wobbles beneath the pressure of being human.

When I speak that sentence aloud, the air around it changes. Not because of my name—we all carry names stitched to memory and lineage—but because of the second half. That’s where the gravity is. That’s where the soul stands up a little straighter. That’s where the deep part of me remembers that faith is not a theory or a tradition or a nostalgic echo from childhood. It’s a lifeline. A compass. A place to set my feet when everything else is noisy and uncertain. Saying I believe in Jesus Christ doesn’t announce perfection. It doesn’t claim to have everything figured out or mastered. It simply acknowledges the One I trust when nothing else in the world seems trustworthy. It acknowledges the One who steadies my breathing when life comes in too fast. It acknowledges the One who has never once walked away from me even on days when I wasn’t sure how to walk toward Him.

But what strikes me most isn’t the sentence itself. It’s what that sentence does to the human heart. When you say you believe in Jesus Christ, you’re saying you believe in the One who meets you exactly where you are but refuses to leave you there. You’re saying you believe in the kind of love that doesn’t evaporate when you fail, the kind of grace that doesn’t shrink back when you’re overwhelmed, the kind of hope that outlives your weariness. People think belief is something that happens on Sundays, in pews, in sanctuaries lit by soft light and choir voices. But belief is built in the quiet corners of real life—late-night wrestling with fear, early-morning questions about purpose, the long desert stretches where you wonder if God still sees you or if maybe He’s moved on to someone more qualified, more spiritual, more consistent.

Belief is not the instant victory moment. It is the slow forming of trust through seasons where you keep showing up even when you feel small. If anything, belief grows deeper not in our strength, but in our weakness. When the world applauds, belief barely budges. But when the world collapses, belief reaches for you like a hand pulling you out of deep water. It’s in those moments you discover faith isn’t an accessory—it’s a survival instinct of the soul.

There are times in my own journey where I’ve quietly wondered if faith was supposed to feel bigger. Brighter. Flashier. But what I’ve learned is that Jesus rarely works through spectacle. He works through substance. Through consistency. Through the subtle shifts in your inner landscape where you suddenly realize the panic that used to control you doesn’t have the same power anymore. The anger that used to erupt so easily doesn’t rise as quickly. The fear that used to paralyze your decisions now has cracks where light gets in. These changes don’t happen because you finally became spiritually impressive. They happen because the One you believe in is remaking you from the inside out.

And that’s why the sentence matters. My name is Douglas Vandergraph, and I believe in Jesus Christ. It’s not a performance piece. It’s not a branding statement. It’s not some curated phrase polished for applause. It’s an identity anchored in Someone who does not shift. The world asks you to believe in trends, strategies, and self-constructed narratives. It tells you to trust your own strength even when you’re exhausted, to trust your own understanding even when your understanding has led you in circles, to trust your own resilience even when your resilience has been frayed to threads.

Belief in Jesus Christ isn’t about having stronger self-confidence. It’s about having deeper God-confidence. And that confidence gives you permission to release the weight of being your own savior. It gives you space to be human without collapsing under the pressure to be superhuman. It gives you a place to rest when your own answers run out, because He never runs out of wisdom or compassion or direction.

One of the most overlooked aspects of believing in Christ is how deeply personal it becomes. We often talk about faith in grand terms, as if it only lives in stories of miracles or dramatic testimonies. But the foundation of belief is built brick by brick in moments that would look unremarkable from the outside: those mornings you wake up discouraged but choose to pray anyway; the afternoons when anxiety tries to tighten your breathing, yet you whisper His name and find your lungs expanding; the late hours when loneliness presses in, and you reach for Scripture not because you expect fireworks but because you need something to hold onto that doesn’t crumble. These moments matter. These moments are where belief becomes muscle.

But here’s the thing most people never say out loud: belief doesn’t always feel like belief. There are days where your faith feels like thin paper, days where your prayers feel unheard, days where you’re convinced you should be further along. And yet, those are often the days when faith is doing its deepest work. You may feel like you’re barely holding on, but what you forget is that Jesus is not asking you to hold the whole world together. He’s asking you to trust that He’s holding you. You don’t have to carry the full weight of belief. You just have to show up. You just have to lean in. You just have to allow Him to be who He has always been.

And that’s where the story begins to shift. Because believing in Jesus means your life has another voice speaking into it besides your own doubts. It means you’re not defined by your worst moment or your biggest fear. It means your story has direction even when you can’t see the path. God doesn’t discard people. He rebuilds them. He reshapes them. He breathes life into places that once felt dead. And the beautiful thing is that He often does this work quietly, beneath the surface, where your insecurity can’t sabotage it.

I’ve learned something through the years: the strength of your faith isn’t measured by how loudly you declare it but by how gently it keeps you standing. The loudest faith is often the weakest. But the faith that whispers through storms, the faith that chooses Jesus when the world gives you a thousand alternatives, the faith that steadies your soul when everything around you is shaking—that’s the faith that transforms a life.

So when I say I believe in Jesus Christ, I’m really saying that my faith is not built on my performance, but on His presence. I’m saying I’ve known moments where I’ve reached the end of myself and discovered He was waiting there with a grace that didn’t lecture me, a peace that didn’t demand qualifications, and a love that didn’t need me to be impressive. And if you’ve ever stood at the edge of your own strength, wondering what happens next, let me tell you: that edge is not an ending. It’s an invitation.

Belief begins where self-reliance ends. And when Jesus steps into that gap, everything changes—not always instantly, not always dramatically, but always deeply. You begin to walk differently. You begin to hope differently. You begin to speak differently. You begin to see the world not as a battlefield where you are outnumbered, but as a place where God has already placed victory beneath your feet long before you could see it.

And this is where the heart of this legacy article takes shape: When a simple sentence becomes a calling, everything in your life gains new meaning. You are no longer drifting. You are no longer guessing. You are no longer defined by the chaos around you. You are defined by the Christ within you. And that identity is strong enough to weather any storm, steady enough to navigate any season, and gentle enough to lift you when you stumble under the weight of your own humanity.

But here’s the deeper truth most people never explore: when you say you believe in Jesus Christ, you are stepping into a lineage of believers who walked through fire, wilderness, heartbreak, and impossible odds, and still refused to let go of the One who held them. You are stepping into the story of people who had every reason to quit but didn’t. People who doubted but still followed. People who felt unqualified but still answered the call. This faith is not a fragile heirloom passed down through generations with gentle handling instructions. It is a rugged, time-tested foundation where countless lives have stood firm despite winds that should have knocked them flat. When I speak that single sentence—my name is Douglas Vandergraph, and I believe in Jesus Christ—I am aligning myself with the faith that outlasted empires, that survived persecution, that endured silence, and that still whispers to every human heart: there is hope beyond what you see.

Yet even with that heritage, belief must become personal or it remains distant. Faith that stays in history can inspire you, but faith that steps into your bloodstream transforms you. And that transformation does not arrive with trumpets. It shows up in moments you don’t even recognize as holy. It slips in quietly during the drive home after a long day when you whisper a tired prayer you’re not even sure God heard. It shows up when life hits you with something you didn’t expect—a loss, a setback, a betrayal—and even though you feel shattered, some small part of you keeps returning to the thought, God has not abandoned me. You might not even say it out loud, but the idea returns like a steady rhythm, a heartbeat of faith beneath your pain.

Sometimes belief feels like silence. Sometimes it feels like nothing is happening at all. But the absence of visible movement is not the absence of God. Some of the deepest spiritual construction happens in the seasons that feel the most still. When you think faith is failing, it’s often taking root. When you think you’re losing ground, heaven is often equipping you with the resilience you’ll need for the next chapter. We don’t grow in the spotlight. We grow underground. And it is that hidden growth that makes belief in Jesus Christ so life-altering. You don’t always notice the day-to-day shifts, but one morning you wake up and realize something is different. The weight that used to suffocate you doesn’t feel quite as heavy. The fear that used to dominate your decisions has lost its edge. The bitterness that used to rise at the mention of certain people has softened into understanding or release. These aren’t random emotional fluctuations. They’re signs that the One you believe in has been quietly renovating the interior of your soul.

I’ve learned that the presence of doubt doesn’t negate belief. If anything, doubt often exposes just how deeply belief matters. We don’t doubt things we don’t care about. We don’t wrestle with truths that don’t shape us. Doubt is not the enemy of faith—it’s the doorway to deeper faith. When you bring your doubts to Jesus, you’re not failing Him. You’re trusting Him with your honesty. You’re letting Him into the parts of you that feel unresolved, unfinished, unpolished. And He doesn’t recoil from those places. He meets you there. He teaches you there. He strengthens you there. The parts of your life you think disqualify you are often the very places He intends to build testimony.

And that’s why believing in Jesus Christ can’t remain a sentence spoken once and set aside. It grows into a rhythm, a lifestyle, a way of seeing the world. It sharpens your vision, not by removing hardship but by revealing purpose inside of it. It shifts your inner posture so that you stop bracing for the worst and begin expecting God to move. You start noticing grace in unexpected places. You start recognizing answers to prayers you forgot you prayed. You begin feeling guided even when you can’t fully articulate how. You become aware of a companionship that does not leave, a mercy that does not run dry, and a peace that does not depend on circumstances. That’s what belief does—it reshapes the inner weather patterns of your life.

When you live from that place, you start carrying yourself differently. Not arrogantly. Not with spiritual bravado. But with a quiet certainty that you are not walking through this world alone. That has a way of changing your reactions. Your perspective. Your tone. Your choices. You begin to respond instead of react. You begin to listen instead of defend. You begin to trust instead of panic. Not because you suddenly became spiritually invincible, but because your belief has taught you something: Jesus has never failed you yet, and He’s not about to start now.

Some people are intimidated by their own imperfections, as if God is surprised by them. As if heaven is expecting spotless performance when all heaven has ever asked of you is honesty and surrender. Belief is not about behaving flawlessly. It’s about belonging fully. It’s about recognizing that Jesus didn’t choose you because you were perfect—He chose you because you were His. And when you understand that, your faith becomes less about striving and more about resting. Less about proving and more about trusting. Less about fear of falling and more about confidence that even if you fall, He knows how to rebuild you.

There is something powerful that happens when you finally embrace that truth. You stop apologizing for believing. You stop shrinking your faith to make others comfortable. You stop diluting your testimony because you’re afraid it won’t sound polished enough. You begin stepping into who you were meant to be—fully, authentically, unapologetically. And the beautiful thing is that this serves others more deeply than you realize. People aren’t moved by perfection; they’re moved by authenticity. They’re moved by truth spoken gently, lived consistently, and carried with humility. When your belief is real, people feel it. They hear it in your voice. They see it in your choices. They sense it in your presence. You become a living reminder that hope is still alive.

This world doesn’t need more Christian performances. It needs more Christian presence. It needs more people who live out their faith in the quiet moments when no one is watching. It needs believers who reflect Jesus not by talking louder, but by loving deeper. Not by winning arguments, but by winning hearts. And that begins with a simple sentence that becomes a calling. My name is Douglas Vandergraph, and I believe in Jesus Christ. That sentence carries responsibility, yes, but not the crushing kind. It carries the responsibility of being available for God. Of letting Him use your life as an encouragement, a light, a testimony, a bridge for others. Some people will encounter Jesus for the first time not in a church, but in you. And that’s not pressure—it’s privilege.

So let this be the legacy rising out of your life: that you believed in Jesus Christ in a world that gave you every excuse not to. That you stood firm when culture shifted. That you held onto hope when fear tried to drown it. That you kept choosing faith over cynicism, compassion over judgment, courage over retreat. And that simple declaration at the core of your identity became the compass that guided your journey through seasons of uncertainty, seasons of growth, seasons of heartbreak, seasons of triumph, and seasons you didn’t understand until much later.

Your belief is not small. Your belief is not weak. Your belief is the quiet strength that has carried you through every wilderness and every breakthrough. And when you reach the end of your story, heaven will not ask whether you were perfect. Heaven will ask whether you trusted the One who was. So keep believing. Keep declaring. Keep walking. Keep standing. That sentence is not just your introduction—it is your assignment, your identity, and the banner of your life.

And may every step you take from here carry the quiet, steady confidence of someone who knows exactly who holds their heart, their story, and their eternity.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

I hear it in my practice all the time: “I want to be more confident.” What does this really mean? When I probe, clients usually express something along the lines of not caring what people think about them, and being able to handle anything that happens to them.

These ideas get bandied about in our culture like slogans, but I find they ring hollow. They seem like obsolete echoes of the American individualist ideal, which deprive us of our humanity. What does that life really look like? How can you have meaningful relationships if you don’t care how anyone feels toward you? I could name some people in high places who operate that way, and they’re not figures I want to emulate.

Being able to “handle” anything—this is about control. People don’t want to feel hijacked by their own emotions. They want to face every challenge in life unfazed. Is this, too, desirable? To move through the world feeling nothing, regardless of what happens to us? Most folks would keep only the good feelings and experiences, but how can you have yin without yang? What is joy without pain, or pride without fear?

The Joy Junkies

Avoiding emotional pain has become the American way of life. Much of my work is about shepherding people through their own feelings, helping them accept the multitudes of life’s experiences, and learn that they can live through those experiences and grow. I’d rather be resilient than unflappable, because when I feel things, it reminds me I’m human.

In our age, when so many corporate and political forces seem keen to turn us into robots, it is rebellious just to be human, to feel things. This means defying the temptation to “feel” good all the time by filling our minds and bodies with stimuli off screens and grocery shelves, because that’s not feeling; it’s numbing.

When we treat anxiety in therapy, we flesh out the details of the fear with a constant refrain of, “And then what?” What will actually happen if this person rejects you, or you miss your deadline, or you get sick? Making the possibilities real often makes them less scary. What remains, after this, are fear of feeling and fear of death.

Because when we really experience things, especially if we were numbing before, our feelings can be frightening. Emotions become overwhelming to the point that people develop anxiety about anything unpleasant, not from the details of what’s happening, but from the discomfort itself. And that makes numbing look awfully tempting, so the cycle repeats.

I can’t help my clients feel good all the time, because that’s impossible. Anyone who says differently is a snake oil salesman. And I can’t make the deep fears go away; we all live with our own mortality. But bad news-good news: it’s better this way, because this is what makes you a person. You’re made of flesh and blood and feelings, and that’s a beautiful thing.

The Painful and the Sublime

Pain, hardship, and stress are necessary parts of life, and make it worth living. It doesn’t mean “confidence” should be a bad word, but how can we redefine it? What if it means being open to the richness of life, in all its dimensions? Being able to endure through hardships and grow, rather than avoiding them? Caring and valuing what people in your life think of you, because you value your connections with them?

Living is scary; I don’t deny that. Every day we face uncertainty, and the only certainty we are given is the one we least want to hear. But I choose to embrace death, not run from it. If life were everlasting, why do anything at all? I find comfort in knowing I have a beginning and an end, and it motivates me to build something of value between them.

Directly or indirectly, I work on this with every client. I try to help people embrace their positions at the helm of their own lives, their ability to shape their experiences. Whatever challenges we face, we have choices available to us, even if those choices are rotten. In the words of Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

How things affect us is out of our control. We don’t choose our feelings, just like we don’t choose our bodies, or our families. So have grace for yourself. “Confidence” needn’t have anything to do with these things you can’t control. But it can be about building intuition and strength of character. If you allow yourself to embrace the messiness of life and your own humanity, you can discover some wonderful things, like growth, beauty, sublimity, and love. Your experiences will change you, and you just might find that you’re open to being changed.

Sadly, pervasive numbing has degraded human life and relationships. I touched on a lot of this in my social media piece, so I won’t repeat it here. It’s not our fault, for the most part. We’ve been handed the syringe. But it’s still our choice if we want to keep using it. I’m not immune to temptation myself, but I try every day to feel present and alive. I try to orient my life toward celebrating my experiences and connections with other people. I am defiantly humanistic.

Text and Photograph © 2026 Philip Bender