The sun is shining night and day. Mosquitoes hidden in the greenery are drinking my blood through straw lips to feed their families as I mind my own business.

And now I’m on the commuter train again, listening to :Wumpscut: again

”Siamese”

Niemals geboren worden zu sein, ist vielleicht der größte Segen von allen

I see the world speeding by through the window; a few red houses but mostly trees and a lake

And a great gray sky

Man, I love this place

Hate 'em. I only went (back when I was the age to) when there was a lounge or something off the main club where I didn't have to worry about being ground on, could actually talk to someone.

The music there could be played on the floor... but it could also just be there for the vibes.

Hitting any track will take the list from there.

Tom Cardy – Transcendental Cha Cha Cha And here I am opening with an existential plea to just dance. I still love it for the absurd presentation and lyrics with the joyful feel of it all.

Underworld – Born Slippy (Nuxx)”) Born Slippy depicts exactly the kind of night I hate... and it kinda knows it. There's a reason most of us know it from the Trainspotting soundtrack.

Radiohead – Idioteque The fact there's a Radiohead song for this mood tells you exactly how rich and varied their career has been.

Motorcycle – As the Rush Comes (Gabriel & Dresden Chill Mix)”) Every mix I hear of this 22 year old song is awesome, and this chill one is on high rotation here.

Oceanlab – on a good day Above and beyond and their related projects get a lot of play with me, and I love the Oceanlab release Sirens of the Sea.

Moby – Porcelain Play's a pretty wide ranging album. For our current listen, it was a toss up between this or The Natural Blues. Both suit the mood.

Lamb – Gorecki Named for the classical composer whose work it quotes, Andy Barlow and Lou Rhodes of Lamb once noted being bewildered at fans asking about more songs like it, that chasing something like it seemed a fools errand and forgot what made it special.

Blue Foundation – Bonfires This song is simply lush. Deeply affecting lyrics and and near perfect production.

Bush – Letting the Cables Sleep – the N.O.W. Remix I think this is Gavin Rossdale's most affecting vocal performance, and this is the best mix for it. Haunting, yet hopeful. Given it was written for a friend who contracted HIV, that fits.

Andain – Ave Maria If ever there was a singer/ producer duo I wanted more of, it was Josh Gabriel and Mavie Marcos. One full length. This is my favourite song on it. The near spoken verses, the sadly reflective chorus, and the beats and tones all mix to paint an unsettling picture of a woman's life.

Morgan Page – Only Human While I love Morgan's work with fellow Canadians Tegan and Sarah, this Natalie Walker sung track with a suspect eye to the dance floor fits the mood better.

Blackmill – Miracle”) This is actually the first Blackmill track I've ever heard, found while composing the playlist. I want to sit with them a bit, I think.

The Avalanches – Since I Left You They famously did not track their samples because they assumed the album would not see wide release, let alone international sales. Now, yes, Frontier Psychiatrist— but today, I wanted the title track. For a 26 year old album, still fresh. Very much a reaction to more drum and bass heavy tracks like Block Rockin' Beats by the Chemical brothers— more leaning to Beach Boys and Phil Spector.

The Chemical Brothers feat Richard Ashcroft – The Test Hey, speaking of. This is a trippy track about a trip.

Groove Armada – Superstylin'”) This was a regular mid-session track on Fridays and Saturdays when 102.1 The Edge in Toronto did club nights.

Röyksopp – This Must Be It First heard these folks on the old blip.fm platform back in the day. Vocals here by Karin Dreijer. There's a heft to the synths hear I quite like.

vast – Free A good song to get people thinking about getting up and going.

Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”) Bolt on your shades and get home, kids.

Chapter One

Jesus prayed in the narrow strip of grass behind the old roadside motel while the gutters still dripped from the storm. The morning had not fully opened yet, and the sky held the dim blue-gray of a day unsure whether it wanted to clear or keep weeping. His knees rested on the wet ground, His hands open before the Father, and the sound of water falling from the roof came slowly, one drop at a time, like the last words of a hard night. Behind Him, Room 11 had a flickering porch light. Across the cracked parking lot, a vending machine hummed against the damp wall, and on the far side of the road, a drainage ditch carried brown rainwater past weeds bent flat by wind. Jesus prayed quietly, with no performance in Him, no rush, no need to be seen by anyone before He was first with the Father.

Inside Room 7, Lena Harrow sat on the edge of the bed with a motel towel wrapped around her wet hair, listening to her nine-year-old son breathe in his sleep. The room smelled faintly of bleach, damp carpet, and the fast-food wrappers she had not had the strength to throw away the night before. On the little table beneath the window sat her phone, its cracked screen lighting up again and again with messages she refused to open. Beside it lay a children’s drawing from Sunday school, folded down the middle from being carried in her purse, and across the top her son had written Jesus teaches the traditional meaning of a rainbow in careful pencil because he had wanted her to watch it with him after church. Under the drawing was a church bulletin with a handwritten note from an older woman in the congregation who had said Lena might also find comfort in a gentle Christian reflection on God’s promise after the storm, but Lena had pushed both papers aside as if paper could accuse a person.

She had not meant to end up at the motel. That was what she kept telling herself, even though she had packed the duffel bag before the rain started and had known exactly where the cheap rooms were because she passed the sign every day on her way to work. She had not meant to leave a note on the kitchen counter. She had not meant to turn off location sharing. She had not meant to make her son cry in the back seat when he asked whether they were going on vacation and she said no, not exactly, then could not explain what not exactly meant. What she had meant was simpler and harder to admit: she had wanted one night where no one could ask her to believe another promise.

Her husband, Jonah, had made many promises. Some were good promises, the ordinary kind that hold a home together: I will call if I am late. I will stop taking extra shifts without talking to you first. I will not let my mother speak to you like that again. I will listen before I defend myself. I will be careful with money. I will come home. None of them sounded impossible when he made them. That was part of what made them hurt. They sounded small enough to keep.

Lena knew he was not cruel. That almost made everything more confusing. Cruelty would have been cleaner in a terrible way. Jonah was warm when he was present, generous when he noticed, sorry when he failed, and able to cry with such sincerity that she would believe him again before she was ready. But the next week came, then the next strain, the next late night, the next bill missed under a stack of mail, the next family argument where he disappeared into silence and left her standing alone in the room with all the words. After enough broken promises, she had begun to feel foolish for wanting to trust him. After enough disappointment, love no longer felt like shelter. It felt like standing under a roof that might leak again at any moment.

Her son, Micah, stirred in the other bed and turned toward her, still half asleep. His hair stuck up at one side, and his cheek was creased from the motel pillow. Lena looked at him and felt the familiar mixture of love and guilt press against her ribs. She had told herself she was protecting him by leaving for the night. She had told herself children should not grow up listening to strained voices behind bedroom doors. She had told herself quiet was better than conflict. But when he had fallen asleep with his shoes still on, holding the rainbow drawing in both hands, she had understood that her escape had become his fear.

A soft knock came at the door.

Lena froze. Her first thought was Jonah. Her second was the front desk. Her third was that she should not have paid cash because now everything felt like a secret even though she had done nothing illegal. She stood slowly, crossed the room, and looked through the peephole.

Jesus stood outside under the thin awning, rainwater shining along the edge of His robe.

Lena stepped back so quickly her heel struck the bed frame. She knew Him before she opened the door. She could not have explained how. It was not only His face, though His face carried a holiness that made every excuse in her feel suddenly small. It was the silence around Him, the deep mercy in His eyes, the way His presence made the narrow motel walkway feel like the edge of something eternal.

She opened the door only as far as the chain allowed. “Lord?”

“Peace to this room,” Jesus said.

Micah sat up behind her at once, blinking. “Mom?”

Lena did not turn around. Her hand trembled on the door. “How did You find us?”

Jesus looked at her gently. “You were not hidden from Me.”

That should have frightened her, but it did not. It broke something quieter. Lena closed her eyes for a moment because she had spent the whole night trying to disappear, and now the One who had every right to expose her had found her without shame in His voice.

She unlatched the chain and opened the door.

Jesus did not step inside until she moved back and gave Him room. Even then, He entered as though the small motel room belonged first to the sorrow already there. Micah slid off the bed and came near his mother, uncertain but curious. Jesus lowered His gaze to the boy.

“You carried a drawing through the rain,” Jesus said.

Micah looked at the table, then at Him. “It got bent.”

“It was still kept.”

Micah nodded, taking that seriously. “It’s a rainbow. My teacher said it means God remembers.”

Jesus looked at Lena. “Yes.”

Lena folded her arms around herself. She wanted to say something adult and controlled, but the words that came out were tired. “People say that a lot.”

“They do.”

“Sometimes I think people say promises because they’re afraid of silence.”

Jesus did not answer quickly. That made it harder for her to hide behind the bitterness of the sentence. He looked toward the window, where the curtain hung crooked and the morning light had begun to thin.

“Some promises are spoken carelessly,” He said. “Some are made by people who do not yet understand what faithfulness will cost them. Some are broken because the heart is divided, or weak, or proud, or afraid. But the unfaithfulness of man does not make the faithfulness of God unsafe.”

Lena breathed out through her nose, almost a laugh but not quite. “That sounds true. I don’t know how to live like it is.”

Micah leaned against her side. She rested a hand on his shoulder, and the gesture was so automatic, so full of fierce protection, that Jesus looked at it with tenderness before He spoke again.

“You left because you were tired of being asked to hope,” He said.

Lena stared at Him.

“You told yourself you were only leaving the argument,” He continued. “But deeper than that, you were leaving the place where hope kept making demands on you.”

Her throat tightened. “Hope doesn’t feel holy when it makes you feel stupid.”

“No,” Jesus said softly. “Not when hope has been confused with pretending.”

The sentence entered the room and stayed there. Lena looked down at Micah, who was watching Jesus with wide, steady eyes. She wanted to cover his ears, not because Jesus was harsh, but because truth spoken gently could still uncover what she had tried to bury under explanations.

From the table, her phone lit again. This time Micah saw the name.

“Is it Dad?” he asked.

Lena did not move.

Jesus did not look at the phone. He looked at her.

“I can’t do this in front of him,” she whispered.

“Then do not make him carry what belongs to you and his father.”

The words were not loud, but Lena felt them like a hand placed firmly against a door she had been pushing open without realizing it. She looked at Micah’s face and saw what she had avoided seeing all night. He was not only worried about where they were. He was studying her to find out whether promises were safe, whether love could survive disappointment, whether a storm meant the whole house had to be abandoned before morning.

“I didn’t want him to hear us fight,” she said.

“I know.”

“I didn’t want him to think staying means letting people hurt you forever.”

Jesus nodded. “That is not what staying means.”

Her eyes filled. “Then what does it mean?”

“It may mean returning to speak truth without hiding. It may mean asking for help before resentment becomes your shelter. It may mean refusing to call escape peace when fear is still leading you. It may mean saying no to what is wrong and yes to what mercy requires. It does not mean pretending the damage is small.”

Micah’s hand slipped into hers. Lena held it tightly, maybe too tightly, and then loosened her grip when she felt him shift.

A sound rose outside, a car passing slowly through the wet lot. Tires brushed through shallow puddles. Somewhere beyond the motel, a dog barked twice. The world continued in its ordinary way, which felt strange when Lena’s own life seemed to be standing before a judge and a healer at the same time.

Jesus walked to the small table and picked up Micah’s drawing. The paper had a crayon rainbow over a blue block of water, and beneath it a little brown boat with a square window. The colors were heavy in some places, lighter in others where the crayon had skipped across the paper. At the bottom, Micah had drawn three stick figures under the rainbow. One had long hair. One had a beard. One was small and holding both their hands.

Lena saw the figures and had to look away.

“When God set His bow in the cloud,” Jesus said, “He did not say the earth would never again know rain. He did not tell Noah that obedience would make the ground easy, or family simple, or memory painless. He gave a sign after judgment, after fear, after long days inside a world of water. The bow was not placed over perfect people. It was placed over a wounded earth as a promise that mercy would remain.”

Micah stepped closer to the drawing. “Is that why it comes after storms?”

Jesus smiled at him. “It is seen when light enters the rain.”

Lena closed her eyes. She did not want to cry in front of Micah. She had already cried in the shower until the water ran cold. She had cried silently while he slept. She had cried in the car before going into the front office to pay for the room. But this was different. Those tears had come from being trapped. These came from being found.

Her phone lit again, then began to ring.

No one moved.

Micah looked up at her. “Mom?”

Lena stared at the name on the screen. Jonah. The letters seemed too ordinary for the weight they carried. Her first instinct was to let it ring until voicemail. Her second was to answer and make him feel the full cost of not knowing where she was. Her third was to hand the phone to Jesus, which was impossible and childish and still crossed her mind.

Jesus set the drawing down carefully. “Truth does not need to be cruel to be strong.”

Lena picked up the phone with fingers that felt separate from the rest of her body. She answered but did not speak.

Jonah’s voice came through strained and hoarse. “Lena? Thank God. Please, just tell me Micah is with you.”

Micah pressed closer to her side.

“He’s with me,” Lena said.

Jonah exhaled so sharply it nearly became a sob. “Where are you?”

She looked at Jesus. He did not nod or gesture. He simply stood there, steady and holy and merciful, leaving obedience in her hands.

“At the Cedar Road Motel,” she said. “Room 7.”

There was silence on the line. Then Jonah said, “I’m coming.”

“No,” Lena said, and surprised herself with the steadiness of it. “Not yet.”

Another silence.

“I need you to listen,” she continued. “Not explain first. Not apologize so fast that nothing changes. Listen.”

“I will,” he said quickly.

“Don’t say it like a reflex.”

He went quiet again. When he spoke, his voice was lower. “Okay.”

Lena sat on the edge of the bed because her knees had begun to shake. Micah stayed beside her. Jesus remained near the table, His hand resting lightly beside the drawing.

“I scared Micah last night,” she said. The words hurt more than she expected. “I told myself I was protecting him, but I scared him. And I left because I did not want to hope anymore. I need to tell the truth about that.”

Jonah made a broken sound. “Lena, I’m so sorry.”

“I know you are. But sorry has to become something we can live inside. I cannot keep building a home out of apologies.”

“I know.”

“No,” she said, softer now, “I don’t think you do. Not yet. I don’t think I do either.”

Micah looked at the drawing again. “Tell him about the rainbow.”

Lena almost smiled through her tears. “Micah, sweetheart—”

“No, tell him.”

Jesus looked at the boy with warmth, and Lena felt the room shift around that innocent insistence. Children often pulled truth into places adults tried to manage.

She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Micah drew a rainbow at church,” she said into the phone. “He said it means God remembers.”

Jonah did not answer right away.

Outside the window, the curtain brightened. Micah pulled away from her and went to the glass. He pushed the curtain aside with both hands.

“Mom,” he said.

Lena looked.

Across the wet parking lot, above the motel sign with two burned-out letters, a rainbow had begun to appear in the clearing sky. It was not grand at first. It was faint, almost shy, curving behind the power lines and the low roofs of the shops across the road. But as the clouds thinned, the colors grew clearer. The rain still fell in fine drops beyond the ditch, and sunlight entered them until the whole poor, tired stretch of road held a sign older than Lena’s fear.

Micah pressed his palm to the window. “It came here too.”

Lena stood slowly. The phone remained at her ear. Jonah was saying her name, asking what happened, but she could barely answer. The rainbow stood over the motel, over the puddles, over the place where she had come to hide from hope.

Jesus came to stand beside them, though He did not crowd the window. “The mercy of God is not embarrassed to appear over low places,” He said.

Lena heard Jonah breathe on the other end of the line. She wondered if he had heard the words too. Maybe not. Maybe they were meant first for the woman standing barefoot on motel carpet with her son’s hand in hers, ashamed of the room and still unable to deny that God had come there.

“What do I do now?” she asked, not knowing whether she was speaking to Jesus or her husband or the part of herself that had been running for years.

Jesus answered. “Begin with truth. Then take the next obedient step.”

Lena looked at Micah. “We’re going to come home today,” she said into the phone, and before Jonah could flood the moment with relief, she added, “But not because everything is fine. We need help. We need Pastor Daniel and Ruth to sit with us. We need to talk where Micah is not carrying the fear in the room. And you need to tell me the truth about what you can change and what you need help changing.”

“I’ll do it,” Jonah said.

Lena closed her eyes. “Do not promise quickly.”

This time he waited. She could hear him crying, but he did not use the tears to escape the weight of the moment.

“I want to learn how,” he said finally.

It was not enough to fix everything. Strangely, that made it feel more real.

Lena looked again at the rainbow. The colors had strengthened now, and Micah was smiling, not because he understood marriage or fear or the exhausting labor of trust, but because a child could still receive a sign without arguing against its kindness. Lena envied him for that. She also wanted to protect it.

Jesus turned from the window and moved toward the door.

“Lord,” Lena said, suddenly afraid that if He left, the courage would leave with Him.

He stopped.

“I don’t know how to hope without becoming foolish again.”

Jesus looked at her with a mercy so steady it made her lower her eyes. “Then do not hope in promises made by human strength alone. Hope in the Father who teaches His children to become truthful. Hope in the mercy that calls sin by its name and still makes a way to rebuild. Hope in the covenant God keeps when the rain has not yet dried.”

Lena held the phone against her chest. The words did not erase her fear. They gave her somewhere to stand while fear remained.

Micah ran to the table, picked up the drawing, and brought it to Jesus. “Can You fix the fold?”

Jesus took the paper and smoothed it gently with His hand. The crease did not disappear completely, but the page lay flatter than before.

“It still has the mark,” Micah said.

“Yes,” Jesus answered. “But it can still be carried.”

Lena covered her mouth as the truth of that settled into her. Not everything healed without a mark. Not everything restored looked untouched. A promise could be real even when the paper still showed where it had been folded under pressure.

Outside, a car door closed somewhere down the row. The motel manager rolled a trash bin past the office. Life went on in its small, ordinary sounds. Lena looked around the room, at the unmade beds, the damp towel, the wrappers, the duffel bag half-open on the chair. She had wanted the room to hide her. Instead, it had become the place where Jesus met her without pretending she was stronger than she was.

She lifted the phone again. “Jonah?”

“I’m here.”

“We’ll come after breakfast. Micah needs to eat.”

“I can bring something.”

“No,” she said gently. “We’ll come. Wait for us. Pray before we get there.”

“I will.”

Lena almost said, You always say that. The sentence rose from habit, sharp and ready. She let it pass without giving it her mouth. That was not forgiveness yet, not fully. It was simply the first small refusal to let old pain drive the next word.

When she ended the call, she stood in the quiet room with her son and the Lord. Micah leaned against her, and she kissed the top of his head.

“Are we okay?” he asked.

Lena looked at Jesus. Then she knelt so she could speak to her son face to face. “We are not going to pretend everything is okay. But we are going to tell the truth, and we are going to ask God to help us obey Him one step at a time.”

Micah thought about that. “Can we keep the drawing?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice breaking. “We can keep the drawing.”

Jesus opened the door. The morning air entered cool and clean, smelling of rain on pavement. Before He stepped out, He looked once more at Lena.

“The rainbow is not a promise that people will never fail you,” He said. “It is a sign that God’s mercy is greater than the flood you feared would take everything.”

Then He stepped onto the walkway.

Lena followed Him to the doorway with Micah beside her. The rainbow arched over the road, still bright enough to see, though already beginning to soften at the edges. She knew it would fade. She knew the motel bill would still need to be paid, the kitchen conversation would still be hard, Jonah would still have to become faithful in ways that cost him, and she would still have to learn the difference between wisdom and walls. But she also knew something else now. The fading of a sign did not mean the faithfulness behind it had disappeared.

Jesus walked down the wet sidewalk toward the end of the motel row, where the grass opened again behind the building. Lena watched Him until He turned slightly, not away from her, but toward the Father. Even before He knelt again, she understood that He had come from prayer and was returning to prayer, carrying her little room, her frightened son, her tired marriage, and the rainbow above the road into the presence of God.

Chapter Two

The walk back to the house took less than ten minutes by car, but Lena made it last nearly forty. She stopped first at the diner beside the gas station because Micah had asked for pancakes, and because she needed a place where the morning could be ordinary for a little while before it became difficult again. Jesus sat with them in a booth near the window. He did not make the waitress uneasy, though she looked at Him twice as if trying to remember where she had seen Him before. Micah ate with the appetite of a child whose fear had finally loosened enough to notice hunger, and Lena wrapped both hands around a mug of coffee she did not really want, watching rainwater slide from the awning outside in thin shining lines.

Micah kept the folded rainbow drawing beside his plate, away from the syrup. He had told the waitress, without being asked, that God put the rainbow in the clouds so people would remember mercy after storms. The waitress had smiled politely at first, but then something in her face changed, and she touched the silver cross at her throat before walking away. Lena noticed it and felt the strange quiet force of a child’s faith entering a room without asking permission. She wondered how many years it had been since she had spoken of God’s mercy without immediately protecting herself from disappointment.

Jesus looked out the window toward the wet road. “You are thinking of turning the car away before you reach home.”

Lena stared into the coffee. “I’m thinking of many things.”

“One of them is turning away.”

She glanced at Micah, but he was busy cutting pancakes into uneven squares. “I don’t know if I trust myself to walk back into that kitchen and not punish him with every sentence I have saved up.”

Jesus received that honestly. “Then do not give every sentence a throne.”

Lena almost smiled, not because the words were light, but because they understood the exact war inside her. She had sentences stored like stones. Some were true. Some had become sharper each time she rehearsed them alone. She could feel them waiting in her, ready to prove the size of her hurt. “What am I supposed to do with what is true?”

“Speak it in the service of healing, not revenge.”

“That sounds hard.”

“It is.”

His answer did not flatter her. It did not turn obedience into something soft. Lena appreciated that more than she expected. She had heard people speak of forgiveness as if it were a warm feeling that drifted down once everyone cried enough. Jesus spoke as if forgiveness might require a woman to stand upright with truth in her mouth and mercy in her hands, refusing both denial and destruction.

When they left the diner, the rainbow was gone. Micah noticed before she did. He looked up at the open sky and frowned. “It disappeared.”

Lena unlocked the car. “Yes.”

He looked at Jesus. “Did the promise disappear too?”

“No,” Jesus said. “A sign can fade while the word of God remains.”

Micah accepted this, though not lazily. He seemed to place it somewhere careful inside himself. Lena wished she could do the same so easily. She buckled him in, then stood for a moment with one hand on the open car door. The air smelled of wet asphalt and coffee from the diner’s vent. Across the road, cars moved through puddles, and people were already living the part of the day that did not know about her motel room or the rainbow or the phone call. She wanted to be one of those people, passing through her own life without having to face it.

Jesus stood beside the car, waiting.

“You’re coming?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She had not known how badly she needed that answer until it came.

Jonah was on the porch when they pulled into the driveway. He had not shaved, and his shirt looked as though he had taken it from the laundry basket and put it on because he could not think clearly enough to find another. The house behind him was small and pale yellow, with a loose shutter near the kitchen window that he had promised to fix in April. Seeing the shutter made anger rise in Lena so quickly that she almost laughed. A whole marriage could somehow gather itself into one crooked piece of wood tapping lightly in the wind.

Jonah came down one step when the car stopped, then halted, remembering what she had said. Do not rush. Do not flood the moment. Wait.

Micah unbuckled himself and opened the door before Lena could decide how to manage the first few seconds. “Dad!”

Jonah’s face broke. He crouched at the bottom of the steps, and Micah ran to him. Lena watched her husband hold their son with both arms, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth moving in words she could not hear. She felt relief, then resentment at the relief, then guilt for resenting it. Nothing inside her moved cleanly.

Jesus stood at the edge of the driveway, near the place where last night’s rain had gathered leaves against the curb. He did not interrupt the reunion. He let the father and the son hold each other. Lena noticed that and understood something she would not have understood years earlier. Mercy did not hurry past the tenderness simply because repair was still unfinished.

Jonah looked up at her over Micah’s shoulder. “Lena.”

She nodded once. It was all she could give.

Inside, the kitchen looked exactly as she had left it and completely different. Her note remained on the counter beside a cold mug of tea. The sink held two plates from dinner. The stack of mail she had complained about was still there, with one envelope opened and laid flat. On the refrigerator, a family calendar hung crooked because one magnet had slipped. Ordinary things can feel merciless after a crisis. They sit there unchanged, proving that life was already hard before the moment everyone noticed.

Micah went to his room after Lena asked him to put away his backpack, but he left the door open. Jonah stood near the table. Lena remained by the counter. Jesus entered quietly and took no seat until Lena did. Then He sat near the window, where light fell across the worn wood of the table.

Jonah looked at Him, and whatever question had formed in him vanished. He lowered his head. “Lord.”

Jesus said, “Peace to this house.”

The words did not float over the room as decoration. They seemed to enter the floorboards, the sink, the mail, the note on the counter, and the places in both of them where peace had been talked about more often than practiced.

Jonah turned to Lena. “I prayed before you got here.”

She nodded.

“I wanted to call Pastor Daniel right away, but I thought maybe that would feel like I was trying to manage it.”

“It would have,” she said.

He accepted that without defending himself, which unsettled her in a different way. She had prepared for resistance. She had not prepared for his restraint.

“I called Ruth,” he said carefully. “Not to come. I asked if she and Pastor Daniel could meet with us later if you still want that. She said yes.”

Lena felt the first small loosening in her shoulders. Ruth was the pastor’s wife, but that was not why Lena trusted her. She trusted Ruth because Ruth had once sat beside her in the church nursery while toddlers climbed over foam blocks and had said, without drama, that some marriages needed witnesses before they could become honest. At the time, Lena had nodded as if that applied to other people.

“Good,” Lena said. “Later. Not yet.”

Jonah nodded. He looked at the note on the counter. “When I found that, I thought I had lost you.”

“You hadn’t lost me,” she said, then corrected herself because Jesus was in the room and the easier sentence felt incomplete. “But I wanted you to feel what I keep feeling.”

Jonah closed his eyes. There it was, one of the stones. It had left her hand before she fully chose it. The sentence was true, but it had been thrown.

Jesus looked at her, not with shock, not with disapproval that dismissed her pain, but with a grief that made her want to take the sentence back and bring it forward differently.

Lena swallowed. “That came out wrong.”

Jonah opened his eyes. “No. I think it came out honest.”

“Honest can still be aimed wrong,” she said, and the admission cost her more than she expected.

For the first time, Jonah sat down. He rested his hands on the table, palms flat, as if trying to keep himself from reaching too soon. “I don’t know how to become the man I keep promising to be.”

Lena felt the old answer rise: then stop promising. But she did not say it.

Jonah continued, his voice low. “When I say I’ll change, I mean it in the moment. I’m not lying to you on purpose. But I think I use the promise to escape the shame of what I already did. If I can make you believe the better version of me is coming, then I don’t have to sit long with the damage the present version caused.”

The kitchen became very still.

Lena had wanted him to understand. Now that he had said something real, she felt exposed too, because truth from one person often calls truth from the other. She looked toward the hallway. Micah’s room was quiet, but she could hear the faint sound of toy cars moving across the floor.

“I use leaving the same way,” she said.

Jonah looked at her.

“I tell myself I need space. Sometimes I do. Last night, I wanted control. I wanted to make you afraid enough to change.” She pressed her fingers against the edge of the counter. “And I brought Micah into that fear.”

Jonah’s face twisted with pain. “I helped create the fear he was living in.”

“Yes,” she said, and this time the word was not thrown. It stood between them like a hard piece of furniture they would have to learn to walk around until they finally moved it together.

Jesus spoke then. “You have both named something true. Do not rush away from that truth because it hurts. A wound that is hidden cannot be washed. A sin that is excused cannot be healed. A fear that is obeyed will keep asking for more.”

Lena looked at Him. “What does repentance look like when both people are tired?”

Jesus answered with the gentleness of One who knew bodies, homes, labor, sleep, and sorrow. “It begins smaller than pride prefers. One truthful conversation. One kept appointment. One apology that does not demand comfort from the wounded person. One boundary kept without cruelty. One prayer prayed when neither of you feels impressive. One act of repair before the next speech about change.”

Jonah bowed his head. Lena felt those words settle into the room with the plainness of work clothes. They were not dramatic enough to satisfy the part of her that wanted a grand moment. They were better than dramatic. They were livable.

Micah appeared in the hallway holding the rainbow drawing. “Are you fighting?”

Lena’s heart tightened, but she did not answer too quickly. She walked to him and crouched. “We are telling the truth. It might sound serious, but we are not trying to hurt each other.”

Micah studied her face, then his father’s. “Is Jesus staying?”

Jesus looked at him. “For a while.”

Micah seemed relieved. He brought the drawing to the table and laid it between his parents. The crease still ran through the rainbow, but the colors remained. Jonah stared at it as if it were a letter addressed to him.

“I’m sorry I made home feel like a place where promises get broken,” he said to his son.

Micah looked down. “I don’t like when Mom cries in the bathroom.”

Lena closed her eyes. Jonah covered his mouth.

There was the wound, not hidden in adult language, not softened by careful timing. A child had spoken the cost.

Jesus did not rescue them from it. He let the truth stand.

Lena reached for the back of a chair and sat because her legs had weakened. Jonah bent forward, weeping silently now, not in a way that asked her to fix him, but in a way that showed he had finally heard something he could not explain away. Micah looked frightened by his father’s tears until Jesus placed one hand gently on the boy’s shoulder.

“Your father’s tears are not your burden,” Jesus said.

Micah leaned into Him slightly.

Lena looked at Jonah across the drawing. The rainbow between them was creased. Their home was creased. Their son’s trust had been creased. But the page had not been thrown away.

“I want Pastor Daniel and Ruth here tonight,” she said. “Not next week. Tonight.”

Jonah wiped his face with both hands. “Yes.”

“And I want us to make a plan we can actually follow. Not big promises. Real steps.”

“Yes.”

“And if we need counseling beyond them, we do it.”

He nodded. “We do it.”

Lena waited for the familiar suspicion to rise and swallow the moment. It came, but it did not swallow everything. It stood there like an unwelcome guest, and for the first time in a long while, she did not hand it the chair at the head of the table.

Jesus looked from one to the other. “This is the turn. Not because all is healed, but because both of you have stopped calling hiding peace.”

Outside the kitchen window, sunlight touched the loose shutter. The wind moved it once against the siding, a small wooden tap. Jonah heard it too and looked up.

“I’ll fix that today,” he said, then stopped. “No. I’ll fix it after we call Ruth and Pastor Daniel, and after we make sure Micah eats lunch. If I start with the shutter, I can pretend repair means tools.”

Lena gave a small, tired laugh that turned into a sob before she could stop it. Jonah did not rush to hold her. He waited, and when she reached across the table, he took her hand carefully, as if trust were something living that could be bruised by gripping too hard.

Jesus rose and walked to the sink. He filled a glass with water and set it before Lena. The simple kindness undid her more than a speech could have. She drank because her throat hurt and because obedience, she was learning, could begin with receiving what she needed.

By early afternoon, Ruth had answered and said they would come after supper. Micah had taped the rainbow drawing to the refrigerator, lower than the other papers so he could touch it when he passed. Jonah had taken out the trash without announcing it. Lena had washed the motel towel and folded it on top of the duffel bag, not because she owed the motel anything beyond returning what was theirs, but because she wanted to practice leaving things in better order than fear had made them.

Jesus stood by the back door as rainwater continued dripping from the eaves into the soft ground beneath the steps. Lena came beside Him, looking out at the narrow yard. The sky was clear now, and the absence of the rainbow felt less like loss than it had before.

“I thought coming home would be the hard part,” she said.

Jesus looked at her with compassion. “It was only the first hard part.”

She nodded, and this time the truth did not make her want to run.

Inside the house, Jonah and Micah were setting plates on the table. One plate clattered, and Micah laughed. It was not the sound of a healed family. It was smaller than that, and maybe stronger because of it. It was the sound of people still under mercy, beginning again while the floor was still damp from the storm.

Chapter Three

By the time Pastor Daniel and Ruth arrived, the house had become too clean in the way a frightened house becomes clean. Lena had wiped the counters twice. Jonah had taken the trash out, swept the kitchen, fixed the loose shutter, and then stood in the hallway looking for another task until Jesus quietly said his name. After that, Jonah sat down at the table and stayed there, one hand resting near Micah’s rainbow drawing, as though the paper were holding him in place more firmly than any command could have done. The drawing had been taped to the refrigerator after lunch, then moved to the center of the table because Micah said everyone needed to see what God remembered.

Lena had almost argued with that. Not because she disagreed, but because the table already felt crowded with things no one had said yet. Instead, she let the drawing stay. The crease ran through the highest part of the rainbow. She had traced it once with her fingertip while Micah was in the living room, and the fold had seemed to ask a question she did not want to answer. Could a promise remain visible where the paper had been bent? Could a home still carry color after trust had been pressed in the wrong place for too long?

Jesus sat near the back window, where evening light lay across the floor in a pale rectangle. He had not taken over the room. That surprised Lena. Some part of her had expected Him to speak first, to tell everyone what was wrong and what to do, to make obedience unavoidable because she was tired of choosing it. But He remained quiet, not absent, not passive, simply unwilling to steal from them the costly dignity of telling the truth.

When the knock came, Jonah flinched. Lena saw it and felt the old urge to interpret him harshly. He always wanted help until help arrived. He always wanted accountability until accountability had names and faces. The thought was not entirely false, but it was not merciful either. She watched him stand, breathe once, and walk to the door without pretending he was calm.

Pastor Daniel came in first, wiping his shoes carefully on the mat. He was a thin man with tired eyes and a voice that had learned to move gently in rooms where people were already embarrassed. Ruth followed carrying a covered dish, because Ruth brought food into every difficulty as if casseroles were a form of spiritual resistance. She hugged Lena without squeezing too long, then touched Micah’s shoulder when he peeked around the corner from the living room.

“We ate,” Lena said, because the dish made her feel exposed.

“I know,” Ruth said. “This is for tomorrow.”

That undid something small in Lena. Tomorrow. Ruth had brought food for a day that would still exist after tonight’s conversation. Lena took the dish and set it on the counter, grateful and ashamed of her gratitude.

Pastor Daniel saw Jesus then. His face changed, not dramatically, but deeply, as if the room had suddenly become a sanctuary around the kitchen table. He bowed his head. Ruth pressed her hand to her chest and whispered, “Lord Jesus.” Micah came fully into the kitchen then, more confident because the adults he trusted had recognized the One who had been in the house all day.

Jesus looked at them with warmth. “Peace to you.”

No one rushed to fill the silence after that. They gathered at the table slowly. Micah sat beside Lena, his shoulder touching her arm. Jonah sat across from her. Pastor Daniel and Ruth took the remaining chairs. Jesus remained near the window, close enough to be part of everything and quiet enough to make room for every hidden thing to come forward.

Pastor Daniel folded his hands. “We’re here because you asked us to come. We are not here to take sides. We are here to help truth be spoken in the presence of mercy.”

Lena looked at Jonah. He nodded once, but his eyes had gone to the table.

“I should start,” he said.

Lena had expected to feel relief. Instead, fear moved through her. She had wanted truth all day, but now truth was approaching with Jonah’s voice, and she did not know what it would cost.

Jonah rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table. “I have been hiding how bad the money got.”

The sentence entered the kitchen like cold air through an open door. Lena did not speak. She looked at him, waiting for her mind to catch up.

“I told you the late notice was a mistake,” he continued. “It wasn’t. I paid part of the electric bill and pushed the rest. I thought the extra shifts would cover it before you found out.”

Lena’s face went hot. “You lied to me.”

“Yes.”

The plainness of his answer made it worse and better at the same time.

“How long?”

“Two months.”

“Two months,” she repeated, and Micah shifted beside her.

Ruth reached gently toward Micah. “Sweetheart, why don’t you help me get some water for everyone?”

Micah looked at his mother for permission. Lena nodded, though part of her wanted him near and part of her wanted him gone from every adult sentence in the world. Ruth stood with him and moved to the sink, giving him a small job with cups, letting him remain in the room without sitting directly under the weight of it.

Lena turned back to Jonah. “You let me think I was losing my mind.”

“I know.”

“No, Jonah. I asked you. I asked you because the numbers did not make sense. You said I was stressed.”

His face crumpled, but he did not hide behind it. “I know.”

That was when anger rose in her so strongly that for a moment she could not feel anything else. The night at the motel, the cold shower, Micah’s frightened eyes, the cracked phone screen lighting in the dark, all of it gathered into one hard wave. “How am I supposed to come home to truth when truth has been sitting here under the mail stack while you watched me blame myself?”

Jonah looked as if the words had struck him, and they had. Pastor Daniel did not interrupt. Jesus did not interrupt. Even Ruth, standing with Micah at the sink, stayed quiet. The room let the truth be terrible.

“I was ashamed,” Jonah said. “And I was afraid if you saw one more failure, you would decide I was only failure.”

Lena’s voice shook. “So you made me carry confusion instead.”

“Yes.”

Micah set a cup on the counter too hard, and water spilled over his hand. Ruth took a towel and helped him wipe it up. “Slowly,” she whispered to him, but Lena heard the word as if it had been spoken to the whole house.

Jesus finally rose and came to the table. He did not stand between Lena and Jonah. He stood beside the drawing.

“Jonah,” He said, “shame told you that hiding would protect your family from pain. But hiding only delayed the pain and taught it to grow in darkness.”

Jonah bowed his head. “Yes, Lord.”

“Lena,” Jesus said.

She braced herself.

“Anger is telling you that if you make the wound large enough, he will finally understand it. But anger cannot become the measure of your worth.”

Tears filled her eyes before she could stop them. “He needs to understand.”

“He does,” Jesus said. “Speak so that truth may be understood. Do not wound so that pain may be shared.”

She looked at the rainbow drawing because she could not look at anyone else. The crease split the colors but did not erase them. She hated how much she needed that small paper.

Pastor Daniel leaned forward. “Jonah, what is the actual number?”

Jonah reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of notebook paper. His hand trembled. “I wrote it down. All of it. Electric, the credit card, the repair on the car, and what I borrowed from my brother without telling Lena.”

Lena closed her eyes. “Your brother?”

“Yes.”

Ruth returned to the table with Micah and set the cups down. Then she placed a hand lightly on Lena’s shoulder, not to restrain her, but to remind her that she was not alone in the chair.

Pastor Daniel took the paper only after Jonah offered it. He read without changing his expression. That restraint helped. A dramatic reaction would have made the numbers feel more powerful than they were. At last he laid the paper flat between them.

“This is serious,” he said. “It is not beyond repair.”

Lena wanted to believe him. She also wanted to reject the comfort before it could disappoint her.

Jonah looked at her. “I called my brother this afternoon and told him you didn’t know. I told him I was wrong to bring him into a secret. He said we can repay slowly.”

“You called him before telling me?”

Jonah’s eyes widened, and for a second the old panic crossed his face. Then he steadied himself. “Yes. I thought I was preparing to tell you, but I can see how that still kept me in control of the order. I should have told you first.”

Lena heard the difference. He was not only apologizing. He was noticing the shape of the wrong. That mattered, even if it did not remove the hurt.

Micah touched the rainbow drawing. “Are we poor?”

The question pierced the room. Lena wanted to gather him close and say no in a bright voice. Jonah looked stricken. Ruth closed her eyes briefly. Pastor Daniel waited.

Jesus knelt beside Micah’s chair so His face was level with the boy’s. “Your family has trouble to face. That is not the same as being forsaken.”

Micah looked at Him carefully. “Will we lose our house?”

Lena’s stomach tightened.

Jonah answered before anyone else could save him. “I don’t think so, buddy. But I should have told Mom the truth so we could make better choices together.”

Micah frowned. “Why didn’t you?”

Jonah swallowed. “Because I was afraid.”

Micah considered this. “Mom was afraid too.”

“Yes,” Lena said softly. “I was.”

“Did the rainbow come because everybody was afraid?”

Jesus looked toward the window. The evening sky had no rainbow now, only a long band of gold where clouds had opened near the horizon. “The rainbow comes after rain because God is merciful before, during, and after the fear. The sign helps people remember what was true even when they could not see it.”

Micah leaned back in his chair, satisfied enough for the moment. The adults were not satisfied. That was right. Some truths were a beginning, not a finish.

The conversation became practical after that, and for Lena, that was almost harder than crying. Numbers came out. Dates were written down. Pastor Daniel asked what could be paid first, what could be delayed, what help might be available without pretending help was magic. Ruth asked Lena when she last slept through the night. Lena almost said she was fine, but Jesus looked at her, and she answered honestly. Three weeks. Ruth wrote that down too, as if sleep belonged in the repair plan beside bills and appointments.

Then Jonah’s phone rang.

The name on the screen was his mother’s.

The old room returned inside Lena at once: every dinner where his mother corrected her in front of people, every time Jonah went silent, every car ride home where he said he had not wanted to make things worse. This, more than money, had taught Lena that she could be alone while sitting beside her husband.

Jonah looked at the phone. It rang again.

“You can answer,” Lena said, and her voice was careful because she did not know yet whether she meant it as permission or a test.

Jonah looked at Jesus.

Jesus said, “Do not use silence to purchase false peace.”

Jonah answered and put the phone on speaker without being asked. “Hi, Mom.”

His mother’s voice came sharp and worried. “Where have you been? I called twice. Your brother said something strange about money, and I want to know what is going on. Is Lena there?”

Lena felt her body prepare for impact.

“She is,” Jonah said. “Pastor Daniel and Ruth are here too. We’re talking through some things.”

“Well, I certainly hope someone is talking sense. Marriage does not survive when a woman runs off every time she is upset.”

The words hit their old target with practiced accuracy. Lena went still. Micah looked at the table. Ruth’s hand moved toward him but stopped, letting his parents respond.

Jonah closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked afraid, but he did not disappear.

“Mom, you cannot speak about Lena that way.”

Silence on the phone.

“I am not discussing our marriage with you tonight,” he continued. “I borrowed money from Aaron without telling Lena. That was wrong. I lied about bills. That was wrong. Lena leaving with Micah last night scared me, but I am not going to use that to avoid what I did.”

His mother’s voice changed. “I am your mother.”

“Yes,” Jonah said. “And I love you. But loving you cannot mean leaving my wife alone in the room.”

Lena put one hand over her mouth. The sentence did not fix the years behind it. It did something else. It opened a window in them.

His mother began to cry, angry and hurt. “I was only trying to help.”

“I know you think that,” Jonah said. “We will talk another day. Not tonight. Please pray for us.”

He ended the call with his hand shaking.

No one spoke for several seconds.

Then Micah whispered, “Dad, you did it.”

Jonah broke then, not loudly, not theatrically, but with the quiet collapse of a man who had finally carried a weight in the right direction. He covered his face. Lena stood before she decided to stand, walked around the table, and placed her hand on his shoulder. She did not embrace him fully. She was not ready. But she stood beside him, and that was true.

Jesus looked at them with deep mercy. “This is not the end of repair,” He said. “It is one beam set back into place.”

Lena looked at Jonah’s bowed head, at Micah’s rainbow, at the notebook page with ugly numbers, at Ruth’s tomorrow-food on the counter, at Pastor Daniel’s pen resting beside a list of next steps. The house was still damaged in ways no visitor could see. But for the first time in a long while, the damage was not ruling from the dark.

Later, after Pastor Daniel prayed and Ruth hugged Lena in the hallway, after Micah fell asleep with the rainbow drawing copied onto a fresh sheet because he wanted one for his room and one for the table, Lena stood with Jonah at the kitchen sink. The dishes were not many, but they washed them together. He washed. She dried. They did not talk much. Silence had frightened her for years because it often meant Jonah was leaving the room without leaving his body. This silence felt different. It had work in it. It had the sound of water, ceramic, breath, and two people staying.

When the last plate was put away, Jonah looked at her. “Thank you for standing beside me when I answered.”

“I almost wanted you to fail,” she admitted.

He nodded slowly, hurt but receiving it. “I understand.”

“I don’t want to want that.”

“I know.”

Jesus stood by the back door, looking out into the dark yard where the rain had left the grass shining under the porch light. Lena turned toward Him.

“Is this what hope feels like?” she asked. “Because it still hurts.”

Jesus looked back at her. “Hope often begins as obedience while pain is still telling you to protect yourself another way.”

She breathed in slowly. The house did not feel safe in the old way she had wanted, the way that required no risk, no truth, no future disappointment. It felt held. That was smaller and larger at the same time.

Jonah reached for her hand, then stopped halfway and waited. Lena saw the waiting. She saw the question in it. She placed her hand in his, not because everything was healed, but because tonight he had not vanished, and because she would not call the absence of risk the only kind of peace worth having.

Outside, the sky was clear and dark. There was no rainbow, no visible sign, no color over the roof. Yet Lena thought of the motel window, the wet road, the bright curve that had appeared over the low place where she had tried to hide. The sign had faded. The mercy had stayed.

Chapter Four

Three days later, the house still felt tender, as if everyone inside it had begun walking more carefully not because they were pretending nothing had happened, but because they finally understood how much could be hurt by careless movement. The old patterns had not vanished. Lena still noticed when Jonah’s eyes moved toward his phone before he answered a hard question. Jonah still looked wounded when Lena asked him to repeat what he meant by a sentence that sounded too much like one of his old escapes. Micah still watched their faces at breakfast with the alertness of a child trying to learn the weather inside a room. Yet there were differences now, small enough that a stranger would have missed them and large enough that Lena could not honestly deny them.

The notebook page with the bills had been copied into a shared folder, then printed and taped inside the pantry door where neither of them could pretend it did not exist. Jonah had called his brother while Lena sat beside him, not to perform humility, but to practice telling the truth with a witness present. Lena had written down the amount owed and the first date they would repay even a little of it. Pastor Daniel had given them the name of a counselor two towns over, and Ruth had texted Lena each morning with one simple question: Did you sleep? Lena had wanted to be annoyed by it, but by the third morning she answered honestly without trying to sound stronger than she was.

Jesus had not remained in their house every visible hour, yet His presence seemed to have marked the rooms. Sometimes He walked with Micah to the mailbox. Sometimes He stood in the yard while Jonah measured the loose boards along the back steps. Sometimes Lena would come into the kitchen and find Him seated quietly at the table with no demand in His face, as though He had all eternity and still cared about whether one tired woman drank water before coffee. He did not make the house feel magical. He made it feel seen.

On the fourth morning, the test came in the shape of an ordinary phone call.

Jonah was standing near the stove, packing his lunch into the old insulated bag he carried to work. Lena was rinsing blueberries for Micah, who had begun making a school project out of his rainbow drawing. He wanted to know why colors bent, why light could be separated, why God chose something people could see in the sky instead of something hidden under the ground. Lena had told him to ask his teacher about the science and Jesus about the promise, which had made Micah grin as if he had been given two treasures instead of one.

Jonah’s phone rang on the counter. He looked at the screen and stiffened.

Lena saw the name of his supervisor.

The old fear moved through her so quickly that the kitchen seemed to shrink. Extra shifts had been part of the problem. Not because work was wrong, but because Jonah had often used work as a place to disappear while calling it provision. He would say yes before talking to her, then come home exhausted and ashamed, and the house would pay for both the money and the absence. Their first counseling appointment was that evening. Lena already knew what the call would be before Jonah answered it. Someone had not shown up. They needed him. There would be overtime. It would help with the bill. It would be reasonable. It would be practical. It would also take him out of the chair he had promised to sit in at seven o’clock.

Jonah answered, listened, and closed his eyes.

Lena turned off the faucet. Micah looked up from the table.

“Yes, I understand,” Jonah said into the phone. “I know you’re short.” He listened again. His eyes opened, and he looked at Lena, not with the old quick apology, but with fear and a question. “I can’t tonight. I have an appointment I can’t miss.”

Lena gripped the edge of the sink.

His supervisor spoke for a while. Jonah’s jaw tightened. “I know what I said before. I’ve been available almost every time. I’m not available tonight.” A pause. “Tomorrow I can take the early half if that helps, but not tonight.”

Micah stared at his father with wide eyes, the blueberry in his hand forgotten.

Jonah ended the call and set the phone down as though it weighed more than metal and glass. No one spoke. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a truck passed and rattled over a pothole.

Lena wanted to praise him. She also wanted to say, Why did it take all this for you to do something that simple? Both responses were true in their own way. Only one would serve the fragile repair in front of her.

“That mattered,” she said.

Jonah swallowed. “I almost said yes.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to tell myself we needed the money.”

“We do need money.”

“That’s what made it hard.”

Jesus was standing near the hallway, though Lena had not heard Him enter. He looked at Jonah with approval that did not flatter and mercy that did not weaken truth. “You chose the work of faithfulness over the appearance of sacrifice.”

Jonah looked down. “It felt small.”

“Small obedience is often where a divided life begins to become whole.”

Lena carried the bowl of blueberries to the table and sat beside Micah. She could feel tears behind her eyes, not dramatic tears, not the motel kind, but something quieter. Maybe relief had its own grief inside it, because seeing a promise kept showed her how long she had lived without that sight.

Micah slid the rainbow drawing toward Jonah. “You stayed under it.”

Jonah looked at the drawing, then at his son. “I’m trying to.”

That evening, the counseling office smelled of lemon cleaner and old books. The counselor, a gray-haired woman named Maren, did not act impressed by crisis, which Lena found comforting. She had the calm manner of someone who had heard many people say they did not know how things got so bad and had learned to help them find the smaller roads that led there. Jesus sat in the waiting room while they went in, not because He was absent from the conversation, but because He seemed to honor the humble human help they had been given. Lena noticed that too. The Lord who had spoken beside the motel window did not despise calendars, trained counsel, payment plans, or difficult appointments kept under fluorescent lights.

The session was not beautiful. Lena cried once and became angry twice. Jonah admitted that shame made him lie before he had even decided to lie, which sounded impossible until Maren asked him to describe the moment between fear and concealment. Lena admitted she sometimes rehearsed Jonah’s failures until she felt powerful enough to speak, then wondered why her words came out armed. Maren gave them homework so ordinary it almost disappointed them: twenty minutes after Micah went to bed, three nights a week, with a timer, one speaking and one listening, no fixing, no interrupting, no leaving the room without saying when they would return.

As they walked to the car afterward, Lena saw that the western sky had turned lavender behind the grocery store sign. No rainbow, no thunder, no visible sign. Just the evening after an appointment. She had expected change to feel more like a door flying open. Instead, it felt like taking the same key to the same lock and choosing not to throw it across the yard.

Jonah opened her car door, then seemed embarrassed, as if the gesture might look like performance. Lena got in without making him pay for the awkwardness. When he climbed into the driver’s seat, he did not start the car right away.

“I wanted her to tell us we were going to make it,” he said.

Lena looked through the windshield. “I did too.”

“She didn’t.”

“No.”

“She said we have work to do.”

Lena turned toward him. “We do.”

He nodded. His hands rested on the steering wheel. “I’m afraid you’ll do the work and still decide you can’t stay.”

There it was, the fear beneath many of his promises. Lena understood suddenly that Jonah’s quick apologies had not only been attempts to escape shame. They had been attempts to secure the future before the present had been repaired. He wanted guaranteed mercy before the truth finished speaking.

“I can’t promise you what only time and obedience can show,” she said.

He winced, but he stayed with it.

“I can tell you I am here tonight,” she continued. “I can tell you I’m going home with you. I can tell you I will not use leaving as a weapon. If I need space, I will say what kind of space and where I am going, and I will not make Micah carry fear in the back seat.”

Jonah covered his eyes with one hand. “Thank you.”

“I need the same from you,” she said. “Not forever in one sentence. Tonight. Tomorrow. The next bill. The next call. The next time your mother says something. The next time shame tells you to hide.”

He nodded. “Tonight and tomorrow.”

It was not a vow big enough for a wedding. It was a promise small enough to keep.

When they came home, Micah was at the kitchen table with Ruth, finishing a sheet of homework. Ruth had stayed with him while they were gone and had somehow convinced him that multiplication could be survived with crackers and patience. Jesus stood near the back door, looking out into the yard. The porch light shone on wet grass, though it had not rained that day. Dew had gathered early.

Micah ran to them. “Did you fix it?”

Lena knelt and took his hands. “We started learning how to fix what we can.”

He frowned. “That’s not the same.”

“No,” Jonah said, kneeling beside them. “It’s not. But it’s true.”

Micah looked from one face to the other, then seemed to accept that truth was better than a bright answer that would break later. He went back to his paper, and Ruth gathered her purse with a look toward Lena that said she understood more than she would say in front of everyone.

After Ruth left, the house settled into night. Micah brushed his teeth. Jonah checked the lock on the back door. Lena put the counseling homework sheet on the refrigerator beside the rainbow drawing. The two papers looked strange together, one made of crayon and one printed with structured exercises. Yet Lena saw the connection. A sign in the sky did not remove the need to obey on the ground. The promise of mercy did not make repair unnecessary. It made repair possible.

Later, after Micah was asleep, Lena and Jonah sat at the kitchen table with the timer between them. Twenty minutes. It felt almost ridiculous. Their life had cracked wider than twenty minutes could address. Still, Jonah pressed start.

Lena spoke first. She told him about the bathroom crying, not to punish him, but to let him know how lonely she had become inside the house. She told him she had begun to feel embarrassed by her own hope, as if every time she believed him she became smaller in her own eyes. Jonah listened. Twice he opened his mouth and stopped. Once he wrote something down so he would not interrupt. When the timer rang, Lena felt tired, but not emptied out.

Then Jonah reset it for himself. He told her about sitting in the car after work, knowing he should come inside and confess the bills, then choosing instead to scroll through his phone because ten more minutes of not being known felt easier than one minute of being honest. He told her he was afraid Micah would grow up and see him as weak. He told her he had thought being needed financially would make him feel like a good man, but hiding had made him feel like no man at all.

Lena listened. Not perfectly. Not without wanting to correct him. But she listened until the timer rang.

When it did, neither of them spoke right away.

Jesus sat with them in the quiet, His presence steady, His eyes full of the kind of mercy that did not rush a seed to become a tree. Lena thought again of the rainbow. She had always imagined it as something only above people, something high and far and beautiful. Now she wondered if its meaning had to descend into kitchens, bank accounts, phone calls, apologies, counseling offices, and bedtime questions from frightened children. Maybe the traditional meaning had never been merely that storms end. Maybe it was that God’s covenant mercy stands over the world while people learn how to live after the waters go down.

Jonah reached across the table. Lena placed her hand in his. Neither of them made a sweeping promise. Neither of them tried to turn the night into a finished testimony. They sat in the fragile beginning and let it be enough for that hour.

The next morning, before sunrise, Lena woke and found Jesus outside.

She stood at the back door for a moment before stepping onto the porch. The air was cool, and the yard lay under a pale mist. Beyond the fence, the first edge of dawn touched the low clouds with silver. Jesus knelt in the grass near the place where the water from the eaves had worn a small hollow in the soil. His hands were open. His face was turned toward the Father. He was praying quietly again, as He had been when the story began, as if all true mercy came from communion before it entered human need.

Lena did not interrupt. She stood barefoot on the porch boards and listened to the hush of morning. Behind her, Jonah moved softly in the kitchen, preparing coffee without clattering the mugs. Down the hall, Micah slept with one rainbow drawing taped near his bed and another on the refrigerator, both creased, both still carrying color.

The sky above the yard held no rainbow, but Lena no longer demanded one. The promise had not vanished when the sign faded. It had followed them into the motel room, the kitchen, the hard phone call, the counseling office, and the first honest twenty minutes at the table. It had not made life painless. It had made mercy believable again.

Jesus continued praying as the morning brightened. Lena bowed her head where she stood, not with perfect confidence, not with a life suddenly easy to carry, but with a heart that had begun to understand that the God who remembers mercy also teaches His children how to remember it together.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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This review is a Writing Repository original.

Merynthia's Master

By Luana Saitta – Independently Published – April 25, 2026

Review by Robin Marx

Revolution is brewing in the seaside city of Merynthia, with the Sicanian underground yearning to overthrow the yoke of the Trynacrian Empire. The enchanted Amulet of Al-Khapish could tip the balance of power in the rebels’ favor, and the Sicanian wizard Barixes Crab-Eye is determined to acquire it at any cost. To that end, Barixes dispatches his light-fingered apprentice Worm to steal the magical artifact. When Worm’s initial attempts to pilfer the amulet end in disaster, Barixes forces him to undergo a startling transformation. Assuming the new identity “Wren,” the wizard’s apprentice goes undercover in the amulet owner’s lavish estate, encountering both unexpected threats and temptations.

Merynthia’s Master is the debut Sword & Sorcery novella by Luana Saitta. While Saitta has previously released a handful of short stories taking place in the same world at Swords & Sorcery Magazine, they focused on sorcerous dabbler Princess Kawtar and her bodyguard/lover Zeynep of the Plains. While I was initially surprised to learn that Merynthia’s Master dealt with an entirely new cast of characters, any faint disappointment at not being treated to a longer Zeynep and Kawtar tale evaporated after reading past the first few pages. As a protagonist, Worm is an entertaining underdog and it’s easy for the audience to root for them. Indeed, appealing characters abound in Merynthia’s Master, with cruel Barixes, affable Trynacrian legionnaire Marcus Posca, and the alluring Qazhia standing out from the pack. Despite the brief page count, readers are given a good sense of the characters’ distinct personalities. Saitta also succeeds in making the bustling pseudo-Mediterranean port of Merynthia itself a character, conjuring a real sense of place that makes the setting come alive.

Merynthia’s Master also benefits from its brisk action. The novella opens with a dynamic chase scene that ranges through, above, and even under the sun-drenched streets of Merynthia. This sequence kickstarts the book, providing thrills and spills from page one. While Worm sometimes wanders off mission, there’s never a lull in the action.

The novella similarly delivers a great deal of spectacle. While swordplay isn’t emphasized to the degree as it is in a great deal of Sword & Sorcery fiction, magic plays a critical role in the narrative. In addition to Worm’s pivotal transformation and the novella’s blockbuster finale, sorcery is put to creative and evocative use throughout. The skeletal scribes working away in a basement, mechanically producing Sicanian revolutionary literature is a fascinating image.

Adding a different kind of spectacle and spice, romance and sexuality occupy a more prominent role in the story than is commonly seen in Sword & Sorcery (at least since the passing of Tanith Lee). The friendly characters of all genders are extremely attractive, enthusiastically receptive to sexual overtures, and completely lacking in jealousy. The sex scenes aren’t incredibly extended or graphic, but they go into a bit more detail than the typical “fade to black” to which many contemporary fantasy authors nervously resort.

Merynthia’s Master covers quite a bit of ground within its slim page count. While I appreciated the fast pacing, parts of the novella—perhaps inevitably—feel underdeveloped. For a story ostensibly sparked by a desire to expel the foreign occupiers, readers aren’t given much cause to cheer on the Sicanian rebels or view the Trynacrian Empire in a very negative light beyond “some of their guards are arbitrary and mean.” Real world history tells us that imperialism rarely works out advantageously for the colonized, but it was vague exactly what yoke under which the people of Merynthia were suffering. The need for an independent Merynthia could have been more clearly established.

Sword & Sorcery stories work best when their authors demonstrate a certain degree of sadism towards their characters, but much of the novella is surprisingly light on conflict. Emotionally I want Elric of Melniboné to finally find peace, but intellectually I understand the story requires Michael Moorcock to put him through the wringer. Similarly, as readers we like Worm/Wren and want good things for them, but the story would have benefited from more obstacles. Worm becoming Wren is a rags-to-riches lifestyle upgrade with even fewer drawbacks than what Will Smith encounters in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Luxurious accommodations, found family, and plenty of sexy new friends! Love this for you, Wren. Perhaps Wren could have been put through more of an awkward adjustment period with their new form, or maybe a suspicious or unimpressed character could have been included in al-Thari’s household to provide some much-needed pushback.

In the end, however, my gripes with Merynthia’s Master can basically be summed up as “I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I just wish there was more of it.” More background, more interpersonal clashes, more setbacks. The characters are endearing, the action exciting, the spice is welcome, and the prose is the strongest Saitta has delivered to date.

Merynthia’s Master is available in ePub and PDF formats from itch.io, and Kindle and paperback formats from Amazon.

#WritingRepositoryOriginal #BookReview #Fantasy #SwordAndSorcery #MerynthiasMaster #LuanaSaitta

Greetings, earthlings. Once again, your moon has disappeared from the night sky, and thus it is an occasion to write to you.

Since the previous new moon, I have been touring various locations where earthlings gather, colloquially termed “watering holes”.

Observing your hidden resentment, and open conflict, I am reminded of one of the proverbs from your ancient sages from China:

“君子和而不同，小人同而不和。”

short stories

Allow me to present a few sketches of human behaviour, that I have dreamt about. Perhaps this might entertain you until the next new moon.

Graphic and disturbing imagery follows. Reader discretion is advised.

Harold

The wind flipped the pages of the Harold's book, but he did not notice. The pungent, smoky titillation that the Scotch whisky presented to his olfactory senses proved too captivating.

Gazing at the honey-coloured concoction, Harold marvelled that he had had an entire bottle of the delicate liquid to himself. Not too long ago, he had watched enviously as men in tuxedos poured a dram for casually-dressed, corpulent tourists from abroad, and now he, Harold McDonald, could have this bottle, all to himself, in the convenience of his lodging. What a little convenience that an inheritance makes.

But, unbidden, a memory came to Harold like a grainy video: long hair, flying in the wind — green leaves, rustling — laughter, tinkling like little windchimes.

Where was she now? The bottle of Scotch sat expectantly on the shelf before Harold, as if eager to please, while he roamed a restless hand across his bald scalp and frowned; how could he ever rid his mind of this video? Dang these thoughts!

It wasn't fair! He had retired! Everything his friends strove for, he now imbibed in excess! Private gardens! Famous acquaintances!

And yet — and yet — her voice came, floating to his ear of ears: “I'm getting married to Mark. This is goodbye, Harold. I don't think we should meet again.”

• fin

---

Siti

“Help me,” said the woman, sobbing piteously.

Sheena stopped mid-stride, looked up from her high heels, which she had been inspecting for dirt, and then noticed the woman: red puffy eyes, tear-streaked cheeks, mucus —

“What's wrong?” Sheena softened, and knelt down to where the woman was perched on the curb of road.

“My boss —” the latter choked out, “My boss —”

“My boss make me fuck men!” At this last burst of emotion, the woman started wailing.

Sheena found that a lump had formed in her throat, and she attempted to swallow it. What should I do?

“Let's go to the police station,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “I'll go with you. Can you manage to walk?”

The woman silently nodded. She has no bags with her, thought Sheena. Did she escape from her boss, in a hurry?

“What's your name?” asked Sheena politely.

“Siti. Siti Sri Bandar.”

A pause swelled into the conversation.

“I have a daughter,” continued Siti, “back home in Mujina. She's turning 10 years old, this year. Please don't tell her about this.”

Siti looked at Sheena, pleading.

“Your story is safe with me, Siti. But I want you to tell the police officer everything. This is not right, what your boss is doing. If they go after your boss in a criminal investigation, this may appear in the news. I hope the reporter or the judge keeps your name anonymous.”

Sheena paused.

“I'm so sorry this happened to you, Siti. Can I buy you a cup of teh?”

• fin

---

bookshelf

1. Editor: Margaret Thomas. “The politics of defeat: Preliminary chapters and the secret diary of Francis Thomas”.
2. Publisher: NVPC, Singapore. “Guide to Impact Measurement: from intent to impact, for non-profits.”

#lunaticus #CraftingStories

As uncertainty continues to be a shadow in my life, I have stayed as productive as ever. There is no reason to spend it at home, stressing and overthinking when I could just as easily go to a workout class with a friend, meet another for lunch and then spend six hours doing my favorite activity: pottery. That is exactly how this day flowed by. Soon they will all blend together, but I loved today. I hope they are all as easy as this one.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

I have been so busy I have not even had a chance to notice the difference. I spent these days celebrating a family birthday and showing up for my community. I have had so much time to catch up with friends and spend time with people I care about. It has only been four days and I have already reconnected with a lot of people!

It was a beautiful weekend full of events and fun. In the middle of all of it, my dad pulled me aside. He simply mentioned that I seemed anxious and to make sure I am prioritizing my mental health.

No update yet, but hopefully I hear something soon.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

In June 2022, in an operating room in Fort Worth, Texas, a 44-year-old patient named Erin Ralph went under for what was meant to be a routine sinuplasty. The surgeon, Dr Marc Dean, was using the TruDi Navigation System, a piece of kit originally manufactured by Acclarent, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, that in 2021 had been augmented with a machine-learning algorithm designed to map the bony architecture of the sinuses in real time. The promise was straightforward: a digital second pair of eyes, overlaying anatomical landmarks on the surgeon's view so that the delicate corridors between the nose and the brain could be navigated with something closer to mathematical certainty. What happened instead, according to a lawsuit Ralph later filed, was that the system “misled and misdirected” the surgeon. Her carotid artery was injured. She had a stroke on the operating table. Surgeons had to remove part of her skull to manage the swelling. She is still in therapy.

Eleven months later, another patient of Dr Dean's, Donna Fernihough, was undergoing the same procedure with the same device. Mid-operation, her carotid artery “blew”, in the description that appears in the court filings, blood spraying from the wound. She had a stroke that day too.

These were not isolated mishaps. In February 2026, Reuters published an investigation that pulled together the FDA's adverse event database with court records, internal correspondence, and interviews with surgeons, regulators, and patients. Before the TruDi system was given its AI upgrade in late 2021, the FDA had received seven unconfirmed reports of device malfunctions and one injury across the device's lifetime. In the four years after the upgrade, that figure rose to at least 100 unconfirmed malfunctions and adverse events, with at least 10 documented injuries. The investigation widened to take in other AI-integrated devices: Samsung Medison's Sonio Detect, used for prenatal ultrasound; Medtronic's LINQ implantable cardiac monitor with its AccuRhythm AI module. In one case, an AI overlay meant to highlight critical anatomy during a laparoscopic procedure failed to flag a structure in the surgical field; cerebrospinal fluid began leaking from the patient's nose. In another, a surgeon “mistakenly punctured the base of a patient's skull”. By the time the piece went to press, there were 1,357 FDA-authorised AI-enabled medical devices on the US market, more than double the number authorised by the end of 2022, with 182 product recalls already linked to 60 of them. Forty-three per cent of those recalls had occurred within a year of approval.

The investigation made clear that part of the problem was regulatory. Dr Alexander Everhart of Washington University was quoted as saying that the FDA's traditional approach was “not up to the task of ensuring AI-enabled technologies are safe and effective”. The agency's AI review unit, the Division of Imaging, Diagnostics and Software Reliability, had been cut from around 40 scientists to about 25 under the Trump administration's cost-cutting initiative, and the Digital Health Center of Excellence had lost roughly a third of its 30-strong staff. An anonymous former FDA employee put it plainly: “If you don't have the resources, things are more likely to be missed.”

But there is another layer to the Reuters story, one that is harder to legislate around and that has begun, in the months since the piece appeared, to draw the attention of a much wider research community. It concerns not the machine but the human standing next to it. In every one of these cases, including the catastrophic ones, the device was nominally under the supervision of a trained clinician. The AI was an assistant. The surgeon, the radiologist, the obstetrician was meant to be the safeguard.

That is the architecture of clinical AI deployment as it has been understood since the field's first regulatory frameworks were drafted. The algorithm advises; the human verifies; the patient is protected by the redundancy. It is a model so deeply entrenched that it now functions less as a deliberate design choice than as a cultural default, repeated in white papers, manufacturer disclaimers, professional society guidelines, and informed-consent forms. Human-in-the-loop. Clinician-led. AI-augmented. The vocabulary is reassuring in roughly the way the architecture is meant to be: a single human pair of eyes, attached to a single human brain trained over years of residency and fellowship, can be relied upon to catch what the machine gets wrong.

The question the Reuters investigation forced open, and that a growing body of research has been picking at for the last three years, is whether this model can survive its own success. If the clinician's role is to check the AI, and the AI is good enough to make that checking feel mostly redundant, and the clinician has built her expertise alongside the AI from her earliest training, then what exactly is the safeguard checking with, and against what reference?

The Faith Problem

The Guardian, in November 2025, ran a piece that crystallised a mood that had been thickening in American medicine for at least two years. The headline framed it as a “dangerous faith in AI” sweeping the country's hospitals. The reporters had spoken to physicians across multiple specialties who described what one of them called a “creeping deference”, a tendency among colleagues, and sometimes themselves, to nod along with algorithmic recommendations in cases where, five years earlier, the same physician's clinical instincts would have prompted independent scrutiny.

There was nothing especially surprising about the pattern. It has a name in the human-factors literature: automation bias, the tendency of humans operating alongside automated decision-support systems to over-rely on the automation, particularly under cognitive load. The term was coined in the late 1990s in studies of aviation cockpit automation, and the foundational synthesis remains a 2010 paper by Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey, two cognitive psychologists who argued that automation bias and a related phenomenon, automation complacency, were two facets of the same underlying mechanism: a redistribution of attentional resources away from a task once the operator has come to trust that the machine is handling it. In the cockpit context, the most quoted example is the crew that flies a serviceable aircraft into terrain because the autopilot has not flagged a problem and they have stopped watching the altimeter.

Medicine has been late to this literature, but it has been arriving steadily. A 2012 systematic review by Kate Goddard and colleagues at City University London, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, pulled together what was then a small but consistent body of evidence that clinicians using computerised decision-support systems made worse decisions when the system was wrong than they would have made without the system at all. The review identified workload, task complexity, time pressure, and user trust as the main mediators. Training, accountability framing, and design choices like where the recommendation appeared on the screen were among the few mitigations that showed any consistent effect.

Since then, the evidence has piled up. In 2023, a study in Radiology by a German group examined what happened when 27 breast imaging radiologists were given AI prompts that were deliberately incorrect. The radiologists' false-positive recall rates rose by up to 12 per cent, with experienced readers affected almost as much as the less experienced. A separate multi-reader study on cerebral aneurysm detection using time-of-flight MR angiography found that false-positive AI findings drove inexperienced readers to recommend significantly more aggressive follow-up examinations; reading times were shorter with AI present at every level of experience, a marker of the attentional shortcut the Parasuraman framework predicts. A 2023 chest radiography study found that incorrect AI results increased both false-negative and false-positive interpretations relative to the same cases read without AI, and the effect was strongest in less experienced clinicians.

The Guardian's contribution was to describe what this dynamic feels like from inside the practice. Physicians spoke of an erosion they could feel but not quite locate. One quoted clinician said that when the AI's read agreed with their own, they felt confirmed; when it disagreed, they paused; and increasingly often, the pause did not resolve in their favour. It is the kind of subjective account human-factors researchers have learned to take seriously, not because individual testimony is reliable evidence of underlying cognitive change, but because the language of “deference” and “creeping” maps onto exactly the attentional patterns the laboratory studies have measured.

The Polyp That Was Not Found

If the laboratory studies pinned down the in-the-moment dynamics of automation bias, the question of what happens to clinicians over the longer arc of their careers required a different kind of investigation. The most striking attempt came not from radiology but from gastroenterology, published in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology in 2025. The paper, an observational study from a multicentre Polish trial called ACCEPT (Artificial Intelligence in Colonoscopy for Cancer Prevention), looked at what happened to endoscopists' performance on unassisted colonoscopies after the same endoscopists had been routinely using an AI polyp detection system.

The mechanics of the study were unusually clean. Four endoscopy centres in Poland had introduced AI tools for polyp detection in late 2021. Between September 2021 and March 2022, 1,443 patients underwent non-AI assisted colonoscopies; 795 of those were performed before the AI system was introduced at the centres, and 648 afterwards, with the AI deliberately switched off for those cases. The crucial comparison was not between AI-assisted and unassisted colonoscopy, which prior literature had explored extensively, but between unassisted colonoscopy by clinicians who had never used AI and unassisted colonoscopy by clinicians who had been using AI as a matter of routine.

The adenoma detection rate, the percentage of screening colonoscopies that identify at least one precancerous polyp and the most validated quality metric in colorectal cancer prevention, fell from 28.4 per cent before AI exposure to 22.4 per cent afterwards. An absolute drop of six percentage points may not sound seismic until you start translating it into lives. Adenoma detection rate is one of the few clinical metrics in any specialty that has been directly linked, in large cohort studies, to long-term cancer mortality: a one percentage point increase in ADR is associated with a roughly three per cent decrease in interval colorectal cancer incidence. A six-point fall is not a rounding error.

The authors were careful with their causal claims. The study was observational; the periods being compared were not identical; the endoscopists knew which cases were being read without AI. But the inference the authors did draw was that continuous exposure to AI might “reduce the skills of the endoscopist”, a phrasing chosen because it was the most parsimonious explanation the data would support.

What the ACCEPT paper offered was something the laboratory studies could not: a population-scale glimpse of what happens to clinical performance when an entire department's daily practice is reshaped around an AI assistant, and then the AI is taken away. The finding was not that clinicians became unable to find polyps. It was that they found fewer, by a margin that, if replicated, would erase years of quality-improvement gains in cancer screening.

The Lancet study is currently a single paper in a single specialty, and its limitations are real. But it landed in a research community that had been waiting for exactly this kind of empirical anchor. A scoping review published in ESMO Real World Data and Digital Oncology in 2026 concluded that evidence of clinical deskilling, although still scarce, was already consistent across specialties: skills faded not because they were unnecessary but because they were no longer practised. The authors framed it, drawing on a much older literature on motor and perceptual skill, as a use-it-or-lose-it problem rather than a fundamentally novel phenomenon. What was new, they suggested, was the speed at which AI was being woven into routine practice, and the question of whether the institutions that train clinicians would respond fast enough to preserve the underlying competencies.

The Pipeline Question

This is where the question stops being one about working clinicians and becomes one about the next generation. A radiologist who finished her training in 2010, used unassisted reads for a decade, and then started working with AI assistance in 2020 carries inside her the reference signal against which the AI's behaviour can be assessed. She knows what an unassisted read feels like; she can notice, in herself, the moment when the AI's overlay nudged her toward a decision she would otherwise have questioned. The radiologist who finishes her training in 2028, by contrast, will have built her pattern recognition alongside the AI from her first residency rotation. She will have no reference signal of her own. The question of what unassisted reading feels like will not be answerable from the inside, because she has never done it.

This is the structural concern Fortune surfaced, in a different register, in May 2026. The piece was framed as a kind of victory lap for the radiology profession, ten years after Geoffrey Hinton's much-quoted 2016 prediction that the specialty was doomed. Hinton, the Turing Award and Nobel laureate whom the press routinely calls the “Godfather of AI”, had told an audience at the Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference in Toronto that “people should stop training radiologists now”, because it was “completely obvious” that within five years, ten at most, deep learning would do a better job than humans. His most-quoted line was the image of the coyote that had already run off the cliff but had not yet looked down.

A decade later, the coyote is still in the air. Fortune, drawing on Medscape's 2026 physician compensation report, put the average US radiologist salary at $571,000, up 9 per cent on the previous year. The number of active radiologists in the United States grew by roughly 10 per cent across the decade. Case loads, according to data from the Journal of the American College of Radiology, climbed 25 per cent between 2018 and early 2025. As of March 2026, there were around 4,333 active job listings for radiologists, with an average time-to-fill of 130 days. Hinton, in a New York Times interview in 2025, retracted the timing if not the direction: he had been speaking only about image analysis, he said, and human radiologists would work with AI to be more efficient and more accurate, not to be replaced.

The Fortune piece treated this as straightforward vindication for the specialty. It is not quite that, or not only that. What the headline numbers obscure is that the radiologist of 2026 is not doing the same job that the radiologist of 2016 was doing. The case load is up by a quarter, and the time available per scan has shrunk correspondingly. AI is part of how that case load is being absorbed; not by replacing the radiologist, but by changing the nature of what reading a scan means. Christoph Herpfer, an economist at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business quoted in the Fortune piece, made the point that AI in radiology had behaved less like a substitute than a complement, expanding the volume of imaging the system could process rather than shrinking the workforce that processed it. Jeff Chang, a former emergency radiologist who co-founded Rad AI, was quoted to similar effect: the productivity gains had absorbed the demand.

That is true. It is also a description of an entire profession being restructured around a tool, with the tool inside the loop of every trainee from their first day on a workstation. The question the Fortune piece does not ask, because it is not within the brief of a workforce-optimism story, is what kind of expertise that workforce will carry in twenty years. If the value of the human radiologist in 2046 is partly that she can catch what the AI gets wrong, the value depends on the human reading skill that was built up across her career. If that skill is now built alongside the AI from residency onwards, the loop is closed in a particular way: the radiologist's expertise is shaped from its earliest stages by the tools it is meant to be checking.

Educational researchers have started to map this concern empirically. A 2024 paper in Insights into Imaging on AI-supported training for radiology residents, which used the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, found that AI increased residents' immediate accuracy on chest X-ray interpretation but did not produce enduring gains once the AI was removed. The residents who had learned with the tool performed worse when the tool was taken away than those who had learned without it. A multi-institutional survey of US radiology residents published in 2023 found that 83 per cent thought AI education should be part of residency, but only a minority of programmes had an established curriculum that took the deskilling concern seriously. The gap between the speed of clinical deployment and the speed of pedagogical adaptation is now wide and widening.

The ACGME, the body that accredits US graduate medical education, has begun, slowly, to ask radiology programmes to document how they preserve unassisted reading practice. The European Society of Radiology issued guidance in 2025 recommending a structured minimum of supervised, AI-free reads during the early years of training. None of these interventions is yet underpinned by the kind of evidence that would tell programme directors how many unassisted hours per week or per month constitute an adequate dose. The honest answer is that no one knows, because the cohort of clinicians who have trained entirely alongside AI is still small enough that the longitudinal data has not arrived.

Mechanism

It is worth pausing, before reaching for mitigations, to look at the cognitive machinery underneath all of this. The 2010 Parasuraman and Manzey paper proposed that automation bias and automation complacency could be unified under what they called an attentional framework. When an automated system performs a task reliably enough that the operator comes to trust it, the operator's attention is reallocated; the cognitive resources that would have gone to monitoring the task are spent elsewhere. The shift is not deliberate, and it is not, in the usual sense, irrational; it is a sensible economisation of finite attention. The trouble is that the reallocation is invisible to the operator, and it persists even when the automation, in a given instance, is wrong.

Apply that to clinical practice and the picture sharpens. A radiologist who has read 10,000 AI-assisted scans has had her attentional pattern shaped, over thousands of repetitions, around the assumption that the AI will catch what she might miss. Each scan is not a fresh act of unassisted vigilance; it is a collaboration in which her attentional resources have learned to redistribute themselves around the algorithm's apparent strengths and weaknesses. This is not a moral failing. It is the same process by which an experienced driver stops actively scanning the dashboard once she has internalised the rhythms of the car. It is what skilled human-machine teaming looks like from the inside.

The problem is that when the machine is removed, or when the machine is wrong in a way it does not flag, the redistributed attention does not snap back into place automatically. The 2025 Lancet study, in this reading, is the empirical correlate of the Parasuraman attentional model: endoscopists who had been working with AI had restructured their attentional patterns around it, and their unassisted ADR fell because the redistribution did not reverse the moment the screen went dark.

The same framework predicts something less often discussed: the deskilling effect should be most severe for the skills least often consciously practised. A surgical resident who deliberately performs a portion of an operation unassisted, against the resistance of the workflow, retains the muscle memory and the perceptual chunking the operation requires. A radiologist who reads the AI overlay first and then “checks” the image is performing the unassisted skill not at all; she is performing a different skill, that of reviewing an AI annotation, which is a real skill but not the same one. Over a career, the second skill grows and the first one shrinks. This is what the ESMO scoping review meant by “use-it-or-lose-it”: the deskilling is not a failure of clinician dedication but a structural consequence of where the workflow puts the human attention.

There is a deeper version of this concern that has been pressed most clearly by James Reason, the British human-error scholar whose Swiss-cheese model has been the dominant metaphor in patient safety for a generation. The model imagines layers of defence against error, each with holes; an accident occurs when the holes line up. In a clinical AI deployment, the AI is one layer and the clinician is another. The safeguard model assumes the holes in the two layers are independent, that the things the AI gets wrong are not the same things the clinician gets wrong. If automation bias reshapes the clinician so that her holes start to align with the AI's, the two layers collapse into one. The defence-in-depth is not depth at all. It is one layer, twice drawn.

What Mitigations Look Like

The interventions the literature has proposed cluster into three rough categories, none yet supported by the kind of trial evidence that would let a hospital trust it.

The first is preserved unassisted practice. The Polish endoscopy data, combined with the ESMO review, has driven the most concrete version of this proposal: that clinicians using AI tools should be required to perform a structured minimum number of unassisted reads or procedures, distributed across their working time, as a maintenance activity in the same way that pilots maintain hand-flying hours alongside autopilot use. The Royal College of Radiologists in the UK floated a proposal along these lines in late 2025, suggesting that one in ten screening mammograms be read without AI as a matter of departmental policy. The American College of Radiology has held back from a specific number but has endorsed the principle. The objection from hospitals has been straightforward: every unassisted read is a read that takes longer, and the productivity case for AI deployment was built on the assumption the time was being recovered.

The second is simulator hours. In aviation, the response to autopilot-induced skill atrophy was not to take the autopilot out of the cockpit but to require pilots to spend a defined number of hours per year in simulators practising the hand-flying skills the autopilot displaced. The clinical analogue would be high-fidelity simulator practice, with real anonymised cases, that exercises the unassisted diagnostic muscles. There is now a small industry of radiology and surgical simulator vendors selling exactly this proposition, and a smaller body of evidence that it can preserve perceptual skill if the dose is high enough. What is missing is a regulatory regime that mandates the dose.

The third, and the most interesting, is structured disagreement. The Stanford radiology group, in 2025, published work on AI monitoring methods that explicitly flag cases in which the AI's confidence has dropped or in which the case lies outside the distribution of training data; their argument is that the clinician should not be asked to second-guess the AI on every case, but should be alerted when the AI itself is unsure. A related but distinct proposal is to engineer workflows so that the clinician records her independent read before seeing the AI's output, with the system then revealing the AI read and forcing an explicit reconciliation when the two disagree. This blind-read-first protocol has been tested in some breast imaging settings with promising early results, but it has the same productivity cost as the first proposal: it slows everything down.

What these proposals share is an acknowledgment that the safeguard model as currently conceived is not self-sustaining. If the value of the human safeguard depends on the human carrying expertise that the AI does not have, then expertise has to be actively maintained as a separate variable in the system, not assumed to persist as a by-product of clinical work. The mitigations are attempts to insert a different kind of redundancy into the workflow: not a second pair of eyes but a second mode of attention, exercised on a schedule independent of the AI's daily presence.

The Coherence Problem

There is a more uncomfortable possibility, which the mitigations sidestep without quite addressing, and which the Reuters investigation, the Guardian piece, the Fortune story, and the Lancet paper all point at obliquely. It is the possibility that the safeguard model is not coherent in the form in which it has been described.

The model says: AI assists, clinician verifies, patient is protected by redundancy. The model works if and only if the clinician's verification is causally independent of the AI's recommendation, which is what makes the redundancy meaningful. If the clinician's expertise has been shaped, over the years of her training and practice, by the AI she is supposed to be checking, the independence assumption fails. The clinician is not a second, independent observer; she is a co-product of the same system. The patient is being protected by a single integrated decision process that has been presented, in regulatory documents and informed-consent forms, as if it were two.

This is the question the editorial accompanying the Polish study in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology was reaching toward when it asked whether AI-assisted colonoscopy was producing better colonoscopy or simply a different practice altogether, in which the AI's outputs and the endoscopist's behaviour were no longer separable. The same question can be asked of every other specialty where deployment is far enough along to begin generating longitudinal data. It is the question Erin Ralph's lawyers were implicitly raising in the TruDi litigation when they argued the navigation system “misled and misdirected” the surgeon: at what point does the system stop being a tool that the surgeon uses and start being part of the cognitive process by which the surgeon decides?

There is no clean answer, because the boundary is genuinely blurry. Every diagnostic tool, from the stethoscope onwards, has shaped the clinical reasoning of the clinicians who use it. The radiologist who came of age with digital radiography reasons differently from the one who came of age with film, and the difference is not nothing. The difference between an AI-assisted clinician and her unassisted predecessor is a difference of degree, not of kind. But the degree matters. A stethoscope does not learn from millions of prior auscultations and update its outputs in real time; an AI system does, and the rate at which the AI updates, and the opacity of the updates, sets a pace of integration that prior tools did not.

The clean answer would be to say we should not deploy AI tools where the integration risks are this deep, and that is a position some researchers hold, in the limit. It is not, realistically, where the field is going. The economic and clinical pressures behind AI deployment are large enough, and the gains in image-by-image and case-by-case accuracy real enough, that the deployment will continue. The question is what the safeguard model means once we have admitted that the human in the loop is being shaped, day by day, by the loop she is part of.

Sitting With It

It would be more satisfying to end with a recommendation. The literature contains plenty. Preserve unassisted practice. Mandate simulator hours. Engineer structured disagreement. Invest in AI literacy curricula. Build monitoring tools that flag the AI's uncertainty. Track adenoma detection rates and mammography false-positive rates and surgical adverse event rates as drift indicators, with department-level interventions triggered when the numbers move in the wrong direction. Each of these is being tried, somewhere, and each is plausible.

What none of them quite does is answer the underlying question. If the value of human clinical expertise lies partly in its capacity to serve as a check on AI error, and that expertise is itself shaped from its earliest stages by the tools it is supposed to be checking, the safeguard model is not just under-resourced or poorly implemented. It is, in some structural sense, in tension with itself. The mitigations are attempts to hold the tension open, to preserve enough independence between the human and the machine that the redundancy retains meaning. Whether they will be enough, at the dose at which they are likely to be implemented, against the gradient of productivity pressure pulling the workflow in the other direction, is not knowable now. It is barely knowable in principle.

In Fort Worth, Erin Ralph is still in therapy. In Poland, the endoscopists who took part in the ACCEPT trial are back at work, with AI mostly switched on, the lower unassisted ADR a number in a paper rather than a feature of their daily practice. The radiologists Fortune profiled in May are earning their $571,000 and reading more scans per shift than their predecessors did a decade ago. Geoffrey Hinton has retracted his prediction without quite retracting its premise. The 1,357 AI-authorised medical devices on the US market are joined every month by more. The trainees who will inherit this system are being shaped by it now, in their first year of residency, in ways none of them can step outside to see.

The honest version of the question is not what we should do about this. It is whether we have given ourselves the conceptual tools to know what we are doing. The safeguard model, as it stands, presumes a kind of independence between the human and the machine that the evidence is steadily eroding. What we put in its place will determine, more than any single mitigation, what patient safety means in the decade ahead.

References and Sources

1. Terhune, C., Levine, D., & Taylor, M. (2026, 9 February). “AI in the operating room: Reports of botched surgeries, misidentified body parts rise.” Reuters / Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Available at: https://www.staradvertiser.com/2026/02/09/breaking-news/ai-in-the-operating-room-reports-of-botched-surgeries-misidentified-body-parts-rise/

2. The Guardian. (2025, November). “A dangerous faith in AI is sweeping American healthcare.” The Guardian.

3. Smith, B. (2026, 4 May). “A decade after the 'Godfather of AI' said radiologists were obsolete, their salaries are up to $571K and demand is growing fast.” Fortune. Available at: https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-radiologists-future-of-work-tech-ai-job-anxiety/

4. Hinton, G. E. (2016). Remarks at Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference, Toronto, Canada.

5. New York Times. (2025). Interview with Geoffrey Hinton on radiology and AI prediction retrospective.

6. Goddard, K., Roudsari, A., & Wyatt, J. C. (2012). “Automation bias: a systematic review of frequency, effect mediators, and mitigators.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 19(1), 121-127.

7. Parasuraman, R., & Manzey, D. H. (2010). “Complacency and bias in human use of automation: An attentional integration.” Human Factors, 52(3), 381-410.

8. Dratsch, T., Chen, X., Rezazade Mehrizi, M., et al. (2023). “Automation Bias in Mammography: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence BI-RADS Suggestions on Reader Performance.” Radiology, 307(4).

9. Eisenmann, L., Stroeder, J., et al. (2025). “Automation bias in AI-assisted detection of cerebral aneurysms on time-of-flight MR angiography.” European Radiology.

10. Bernstein, M. H., et al. (2023). “Can incorrect artificial intelligence (AI) results impact radiologists, and if so, what can we do about it? A multi-reader pilot study of lung cancer detection with chest radiography.” European Radiology, 33(11).

11. Budzyń, K., Romańczyk, M., Kitala, D., et al. (2025). “Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study.” The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology.

12. The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology editorial. (2025). “Endoscopist deskilling: an unintended consequence of AI-assisted colonoscopy?”

13. ESMO Real World Data and Digital Oncology. (2026). “Artificial intelligence in medicine: a scoping review of the risk of deskilling and loss of expertise among physicians.”

14. Reason, J. (2000). “Human error: models and management.” BMJ, 320(7237), 768-770.

15. Medscape. (2026). Physician Compensation Report 2026.

16. Journal of the American College of Radiology. (2025). Workforce and case load data, 2018-2025.

17. Sorrentino, S., et al. (2024). “Upskilling or deskilling? Measurable role of an AI-supported training for radiology residents: a lesson from the pandemic.” Insights into Imaging, 15(1).

18. Wiggins, W. F., et al. (2023). “Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Education in Radiology: Multi-institutional Survey of Radiology Residents in the United States.” Academic Radiology.

19. Stanford Radiology. (2025). “New AI Monitoring Method Helps Convey When to Trust AI Predictions and When to Exercise Caution.” Stanford Medicine News. Available at: https://med.stanford.edu/radiology/news/2025-news/new-ai-monitoring-method-helps-convey-when-to-trust-ai-predictio.html

20. Royal College of Radiologists. (2025). Guidance on AI use in screening mammography.

21. European Society of Radiology. (2025). Position paper on AI training in radiology residency.

22. Everhart, A. (2026). Quoted in Reuters investigation on AI surgical devices.

23. US Food and Drug Administration. (2026). AI-Enabled Medical Devices Database. Available at: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-enabled-medical-devices

24. Lehman, C. D., et al. (2015). “Diagnostic Accuracy of Digital Screening Mammography With and Without Computer-Aided Detection.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 175(11), 1828-1837.

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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

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My vacation has officially begun!!

This time, I didn’t do a mad dash to send the final set of emails. I didn’t feel the pressure of leaving. I eased into the end of the day like a car cruising along Route 66.

I could not believe I was the same person.

About 30 minutes before the day ended, I had this bright idea to update my planner with all the things I need to do when I return from vacation. Yes. I got my headphones and I was about to get it done.

4:33PM.

Three minutes over. I didn’t add everything I wanted. But it was perfect.

I kept a sticky note on my desk for the last couple weeks: progress over perfection.

That’s what I’ve been leaning into. And as the clock ticked to 4:35, I closed all my programs and stepped away.

Chapter 1: The Picture on the Wall

There are people who first met Jesus through a picture before they ever met Him through Scripture. Maybe it was hanging in a hallway at church, printed inside an old family Bible, taped to a Sunday school wall, or glowing softly in stained glass while adults whispered for children to sit still. The face was calm, pale, gentle, familiar, and safe in a way that almost seemed impossible to question. For many people, that image became the quiet background of their faith before they were old enough to ask where it came from, and that is why this matters. When someone finally begins to wonder why Jesus has so often been shown as white, American-looking, or Western, they are not just asking about art; they are asking whether they have inherited a picture that helped them feel close to Him or a picture that slowly made Him smaller. That is the deeper place this article enters, alongside the real Jesus was not white American or Western-looking video and the larger path of recovering the Jesus Scripture actually reveals.

A person can sit in church for years and never say this out loud, but there may come a moment when the old image starts to feel strange. It might happen while reading about Jesus being born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. It might happen while hearing that He went to synagogue, celebrated Jewish feasts, quoted Hebrew Scripture, lived under Roman occupation, and moved through towns where dusty roads, fishing nets, taxes, hunger, religious tension, and political fear were part of ordinary life. Suddenly the picture on the wall feels less like history and more like something a culture made for itself. That does not mean everyone who painted Jesus that way was evil. Many artists painted from what they knew. Many believers used the tools, colors, faces, and traditions around them. But there is a difference between a painting that helps someone imagine Jesus and a picture that quietly teaches people Jesus belongs mostly to their kind of world.

This is where many of us have to slow down and be honest. We may say we believe Jesus is Lord of all, but our imagination can still keep Him close to our own neighborhood, our own politics, our own nation, our own race, our own habits, our own comfort. We may know with our mind that Jesus was Jewish, but still carry a private version of Him who feels like He thinks like us, talks like us, approves of us, and naturally stands on our side against everyone else. That is the danger. The deepest problem is not that someone once saw a pale painting of Jesus. The deeper problem is that human beings are always tempted to remake God into someone easier to use.

A mother cleaning out her parents’ house after a funeral may find an old framed image of Jesus wrapped in newspaper inside a cardboard box. She may pause longer than she expected because that picture was in the dining room when she was small. She remembers Sunday lunches, her father’s voice, her mother wiping the counter, the smell of coffee, the arguments that broke out after church, the prayers said before meals, and the way that face of Jesus seemed to watch over everything. She may not hate the picture. She may even feel tenderness toward it. But now, after years of pain, questions, reading, living, and trying to follow Christ more honestly, she may also feel something else. She may wonder whether the Jesus her family talked about was sometimes used to keep everyone quiet, to protect pride, to bless prejudice, to avoid repentance, or to make their culture feel holy without actually becoming humble.

That kind of moment is not about attacking childhood memories. It is about letting Jesus be greater than them.

Faith can begin with what we are handed, but it cannot stay forever inside what we were handed. At some point, if we are serious, Jesus starts stepping beyond the frame. He steps beyond the little picture we were given. He steps beyond the soft religious artwork. He steps beyond family assumptions, national habits, church traditions, political slogans, and the version of Him that never challenges us. He starts asking whether we want the comfort of a familiar image or the truth of the living Lord.

The truth is simple enough to say, but it carries a lot of weight. Jesus was not white. Jesus was not American. Jesus was not Western. Jesus was a first-century Jewish man from the Middle East. He was born into the story of Israel. He grew up in a real town, among real people, under real pressure. He knew the Scriptures of Israel not as museum pieces, but as the living word that shaped the people He came through. He did not float into human history as a blank spiritual symbol. He entered a particular family line, a particular nation, a particular language world, a particular set of promises, a particular struggle, a particular place.

That does not trap Him inside one people group. It does the opposite. It shows us that God’s love for the whole world came through real history, not vague religious imagination. The Savior of every nation came through Israel. The Lord of all people entered one people. The eternal Son of God took on a real human body, in a real time, in a real place, among real neighbors, with real skin, real tired feet, real hunger, real tears, real danger, real rejection, and real love.

Sometimes people get nervous when this is said because they think it takes something away from Jesus. It does not. It gives back what our imagination stole. A real Jesus is stronger than a vague Jesus. A Jewish Messiah is more beautiful than a cultureless symbol. A Savior rooted in history is more trustworthy than a religious image shaped mostly by whoever had the paintbrush, the printing press, the movie camera, or the loudest public voice.

The issue is not whether every piece of Christian art must look the same. The church has always used art in different ways, and people across the world have often pictured Jesus with features familiar to their community. There can be something tender in that when it expresses the truth that Christ came for every people. A child in one country may draw Jesus in the colors of that child’s world because the child is reaching for nearness, not trying to rewrite history. But when a powerful culture turns its version of Jesus into the normal one, the superior one, or the official one, something dangerous begins to happen. The image stops being a bridge and starts becoming a cage.

Inside that cage, Jesus can be made to serve the people who created the image. He can be made to bless conquest, excuse cruelty, ignore racism, baptize greed, flatter nationalism, and protect the sins of those who already feel in control. A white Western Jesus has often been used, directly or indirectly, to make Christianity feel like the possession of the West rather than the good news of the kingdom of God. That is not a small problem. When people believe Jesus belongs to one race, one nation, or one cultural system more than others, they can start treating other people as guests in a faith that was never theirs to own.

But the gospel does not move that way. The gospel does not say, “Come to our culture and maybe you can borrow our Jesus.” The gospel says Jesus is Lord. It says every knee will bow. It says every tribe and language and people and nation are seen before God. It says the dividing walls human beings build do not get the final word. It says no race owns Him, no flag contains Him, no political party controls Him, no empire can use Him without being judged by Him, and no wounded person has to stand far away because someone else made Jesus look like a stranger.

This matters deeply for the person who has felt pushed to the edge of Christian spaces because the version of Jesus they were shown seemed to come wrapped in someone else’s pride. Maybe they heard the name of Jesus used in rooms where people also told jokes about people who looked like them. Maybe they watched Christians defend harshness while holding up a soft painting of the Savior. Maybe they heard that Christianity was a Western religion and felt like accepting Jesus meant betraying their family, their history, their people, or their dignity. Maybe they walked away not because they hated Christ, but because the Christ they were shown had been buried under cultural ownership.

If that is you, I want to say this gently and clearly. Jesus is not the property of the people who misrepresented Him. Jesus is not owned by the loudest Christians you have met. Jesus is not limited to the artwork you were given. Jesus is not trapped inside the culture that claimed Him most aggressively. He is not less present in your language, your neighborhood, your family story, your suffering, or your prayers. The same Lord who came through Israel sent His disciples to the nations. He crossed borders before many of His followers learned how. He touched the unclean. He spoke with the outsider. He praised faith in unexpected places. He noticed people others dismissed. He refused to let human categories decide who could receive mercy.

A man sitting alone in his car after work may understand this before he can explain it. He may have spent years thinking Christianity was not for people like him because every public version of faith he saw looked tied to a culture that seemed to look down on him. He may have heard Jesus talked about more like a mascot for certain people than a Savior for sinners. Then one day, maybe through Scripture, maybe through a quiet conversation, maybe through a moment of exhaustion when he finally prays with no polished words, he begins to see something different. Jesus is not asking him to bow before another group’s pride. Jesus is asking him to come to the Son of God.

That realization can open a locked door in the soul.

Because when Jesus is freed from cultural ownership, people can finally see Him standing where He has always stood: above us, before us, near us, and not available for our manipulation. He is not less than Jewish, and He is not only for Jewish people. He is not Western, and He is not against Western people. He is not American, and He is not absent from America. He is not white, and He is not hostile to white people. He is the Savior of the world, and that means every group must come to Him the same way: humbled, needy, repentant, loved, and unable to claim ownership over the One who owns all things.

This is where the subject becomes personal for all of us. It is easy to talk about inaccurate pictures of Jesus and think the main issue is what hangs on a wall. But the more serious question is what hangs inside the heart. What image of Jesus do I protect because it protects me? What version of Jesus have I kept because it never interrupts my pride? Have I made Him more comfortable than holy? Have I made Him more national than eternal? Have I made Him more like my group than like the Lord who calls my group to repentance? Have I made Him angry at everyone I am angry at, silent about what I want to keep, and generous toward everything that benefits me?

These questions are not meant to shame us. They are meant to wake us up.

Every human heart is capable of editing Jesus. We edit Him when we remove His Jewishness. We edit Him when we remove His authority. We edit Him when we remove His mercy. We edit Him when we remove His judgment. We edit Him when we make Him only gentle and never commanding, or only commanding and never tender. We edit Him when we make Him a symbol for our side instead of the King before whom all sides must answer. We edit Him when we use His name to win arguments but do not let His Spirit search our motives.

The real Jesus will not be edited without eventually confronting the editor.

He did it in His own day. People wanted a Messiah who fit their expectations. Some wanted power. Some wanted signs. Some wanted political deliverance on their terms. Some wanted religious validation. Some wanted Him to stay inside the boundaries they understood. But Jesus kept revealing a kingdom deeper than their categories. He healed on days people argued about. He ate with people others despised. He praised the faith of outsiders. He rebuked respected leaders. He refused to perform for Herod. He stood silent before accusations when silence carried more truth than self-defense. He told Pilate His kingdom was not of this world, and yet He also made clear that Pilate’s power was not ultimate.

That is not a Jesus anyone can safely use.

The Jesus of Scripture is not vague enough to be harmless. He is specific. He is Jewish. He is holy. He is merciful. He is embodied. He is risen. He is Lord. He is not an idea that can be bent into whatever shape a culture needs. He is the living Christ who bends cultures, families, churches, nations, and individual hearts toward the truth of God.

When this truth settles in, it can be uncomfortable at first. It may feel like something familiar is being taken away. But often God has to unsettle a false comfort so He can give us a truer one. The goal is not to make Jesus feel distant by reminding us He was not like the paintings. The goal is to make Him real enough to trust. A Savior invented by culture cannot carry the weight of your soul. A Savior reduced to your tribe cannot rescue the world. A Savior made in your image cannot remake you in His.

And that is what we need. We do not need a Jesus who looks like our assumptions. We need the Jesus who saves us from them. We need the Jesus who meets the child in Sunday school, the grieving mother with the old picture frame, the tired man in the car, the person wounded by religious pride, the believer who never questioned inherited images, the outsider who thought Christianity was someone else’s religion, and the church that needs to repent of confusing cultural familiarity with spiritual truth.

There is a quiet kind of freedom in letting the real Jesus stand before us again. It is the freedom of no longer having to defend a smaller version of Him. It is the freedom of saying, “Lord, I want You as You are, not as I was trained to imagine You.” It is the freedom of reading the Gospels with fresh eyes, noticing His Jewish world, His human body, His holy authority, His nearness to the rejected, His refusal to be owned, His patience with the weak, His sharpness toward hypocrisy, and His love that reaches farther than our categories.

Maybe that is where this has to begin for many of us. Not with an argument. Not with outrage. Not with tearing every old picture off every wall as if the physical object is the whole issue. Maybe it begins with a more honest prayer. Lord Jesus, show me where I have made You too familiar. Show me where I have confused my culture with Your kingdom. Show me where I have used You instead of followed You. Show me where I have ignored the parts of Your story that would humble me. Show me where I have forgotten that You came through Israel for the salvation of the world.

That kind of prayer may not feel dramatic, but it is dangerous in the best way. It invites the real Christ to correct the imagined one. It invites Scripture to challenge memory. It invites worship to become deeper than nostalgia. It invites the believer to stop protecting the picture and start following the Person.

And maybe, after all the questions, that is the mercy hidden inside this subject. God is not asking us to have perfect historical imagination before we come to Jesus. He is not asking every wounded person, every confused believer, every child raised on old paintings, or every adult shaped by inherited assumptions to figure everything out before receiving grace. He is inviting us to keep coming closer to the truth. He is inviting us to let Jesus become more real than the images, more holy than the slogans, more merciful than the harsh voices, more authoritative than the cultures that tried to claim Him, and more beautiful than the small versions of Him we thought we had to defend.

The picture on the wall may have been where someone first looked toward Him. But the living Jesus is not trapped there. He is walking through the pages of Scripture, through the dust of Galilee, through the promises of Israel, through the cross, through the empty tomb, through the witness of the Spirit, and through the lives of people from every nation who discover that He is not the possession of one culture, but the hope of the world.

Chapter 2: When Familiar Becomes a Fence

A teenager can sit in the back row of a church and feel like everyone else knows how to belong. He sees the flags on the stage, the framed verses in the hallway, the people greeting each other with the easy warmth of those who know the rules of the room, and he wonders whether Jesus is really as near to him as everyone says. Nobody has to say anything cruel for the feeling to form. Sometimes the message is not in a sermon. Sometimes it is in the faces on the posters, the examples used from the front, the jokes people laugh at in the lobby, the way certain names sound normal and other names sound foreign, the way one kind of family seems to represent the faith and every other kind of family seems to be quietly visiting someone else’s house. He may not have the words for it yet, but inside he is asking a painful question: Is Jesus for me, or am I being invited into someone else’s version of Him?

That question matters because the image of Jesus is never only about appearance. Appearance becomes atmosphere. Atmosphere becomes belonging. Belonging shapes whether a person feels safe enough to pray honestly or whether they feel like they have to become someone else before God will listen. When Jesus is repeatedly presented through one cultural lens as though that lens is neutral, people who do not fit that lens can begin to feel like outsiders to the Savior who came for them too. They may still hear the words “God loves everyone,” but the room may quietly tell them that some people are closer to the center than others. That is not the heart of Christ. That is the failure of human imagination when it forgets the wideness of the gospel.

The danger grows when familiarity becomes a fence. A familiar picture can comfort a child, but a fenced picture can keep other people out. A familiar song can help a person worship, but a fenced song can make one culture’s style feel like the only holy sound. A familiar church habit can give people rhythm, but a fenced habit can make everyone else feel less serious, less reverent, less Christian, or less welcome. This is how cultural Christianity becomes heavy. It does not always announce itself with hatred. Sometimes it simply acts as though its own way of seeing, speaking, dressing, praying, voting, singing, organizing, and imagining Jesus is the default, and everyone else must explain themselves.

The real Jesus keeps breaking that fence. He does not do it by becoming vague. He does it by being more specific than our pride expected. He is not a blank figure who can be painted into every agenda without resistance. He is the Jewish Messiah, and that truth itself prevents any later culture from claiming first ownership. Before America existed, before Europe shaped its cathedrals, before English Bibles sat on kitchen tables, before modern political categories, before denominations and publishing platforms and church brands, Jesus was born into Israel’s story. He came through Abraham’s promise, David’s line, Mary’s womb, Bethlehem’s poverty, Nazareth’s ordinariness, Galilee’s dust, Jerusalem’s tension, Passover’s meaning, and Rome’s shadow. His particularity is not an obstacle to His universal love. It is the way God chose to enter the world.

That can humble the person who has always assumed Jesus naturally stands closest to their culture. It can also heal the person who was told, openly or indirectly, that Jesus belonged somewhere far away from them. The Jewishness of Jesus does not make Him smaller. It keeps everyone honest. It tells the Western believer, “You did not invent Him.” It tells the outsider, “They do not own Him.” It tells the proud, “You must come low.” It tells the wounded, “You are not excluded by someone else’s painting.” It tells the church, “The Lord you worship came through a people, but He cannot be possessed by any people.”

A woman standing in a grocery store aisle may feel this in a way no theology book could explain. She may hear two people nearby talking about “Christian values” while speaking with contempt about immigrants, refugees, or people whose accents sound different from theirs. She may stand there with a carton of eggs in her hand and feel a quiet anger rise in her chest because she knows enough of the Bible to know that Jesus Himself lived under occupation, that His family fled danger when He was small, that the Scriptures He loved repeatedly warned God’s people not to mistreat the stranger. She may not interrupt the conversation. She may simply keep walking. But later, in the car, she may whisper, “Lord, how did Your name become attached to this?” That question is not rebellion. Sometimes it is reverence refusing to let the name of Jesus be used carelessly.

There is a great difference between loving your country and confusing your country with the kingdom of God. A Christian can be grateful for a place, serve neighbors, honor what is good, and pray for leaders without treating national identity as though it sits beside the cross. But when Jesus is made American in the imagination, people can begin to think their nation’s instincts are automatically His instincts. They can mistake comfort for blessing, power for righteousness, wealth for favor, and cultural dominance for spiritual faithfulness. They may read the Bible, but only hear the parts that seem to protect what they already love. They may call Jesus Lord, but expect Him to salute their flag before He corrects their heart.

The same temptation shows up far beyond politics. It appears in family stories, church traditions, neighborhood assumptions, and private loyalties. A grandfather may say, “This is how Christians have always done it,” when what he really means is, “This is how my people did it.” A church may call something biblical when it is mostly familiar. A believer may feel suspicious of worship that sounds different, prayers that use different words, or Christian joy that carries another culture’s rhythm. None of this means every tradition is wrong. Tradition can carry wisdom, memory, and beauty. But tradition becomes dangerous when it sits in the chair reserved for Jesus.

To follow Christ honestly, we have to let Him separate what is holy from what is merely familiar. That is not always easy because familiar things often carry love. We may associate a certain picture of Jesus with our grandmother’s house, a certain hymn with childhood safety, a certain church style with the first place we heard the gospel, a certain national memory with sacrifice and gratitude. God does not ask us to despise every familiar thing. He asks us not to worship it. He asks us not to confuse the container with the treasure. He asks us to love what is good without making it ultimate.

This is where the heart often resists. We may say, “It is just a picture,” because we do not want to talk about what the picture has protected. We may say, “It is just tradition,” because we do not want to examine whether tradition has been used to exclude someone. We may say, “It is just how I was raised,” because questioning inherited assumptions feels like dishonoring the people who loved us. But truth does not require cruelty toward our past. We can be grateful for those who handed us pieces of faith while still allowing Jesus to purify what was mixed into the package. We can honor a grandmother’s prayers and still admit the picture above her table was not history. We can love the church that raised us and still see where it made culture feel like gospel. We can receive what was good without defending what was false.

There is a quiet pain in that process because it can feel like the ground is moving. A person may look back and realize that some of what they called Christianity was actually family preference, regional habit, political training, racial comfort, or fear of change. That realization can bring sadness. It can also bring relief. When Jesus becomes larger than the version we inherited, faith does not collapse. It breathes. Scripture opens. People become visible. The Old Testament becomes less like a distant preface and more like the soil from which the Messiah came. The Gospels feel more alive because Jesus is no longer floating in a Western painting; He is walking through real Jewish towns, speaking to real crowds, answering real arguments, touching real people, and fulfilling real promises.

This kind of seeing can change how we treat others. If Jesus does not belong to our culture, then we cannot treat people from other cultures as spiritual guests. If Jesus came through Israel, then we should read Scripture with gratitude instead of acting as if Christianity began when our group discovered it. If Jesus is Lord of every nation, then we should be careful when our group tries to make Him useful. If the gospel is for the world, then the church should become a place where people are not pressured to erase their story before they can receive grace. Repentance does not mean becoming culturally identical to the people who first told you about Jesus. Repentance means turning from sin and coming alive in Christ.

A college student may discover this while sitting at a small table in the campus library. She is reading the Gospel of Luke for a class, expecting it to feel familiar, but something catches her attention. Jesus notices people others pass by. He speaks with authority but does not seem impressed by status. He honors faith in unexpected people. He refuses to let insiders decide the limits of mercy. She looks around the library and realizes that the Jesus on the page is not the narrow figure she had resisted in her mind. He is stronger, stranger, kinder, and harder to control. For the first time in years, she does not feel like she is returning to a childhood image. She feels like she is meeting Someone alive.

That is what many people need. Not a cultural argument that leaves everyone defensive, but a clearer meeting with the real Christ. When Jesus is seen as He is, the white Western image loses its power to define Him. It may remain a piece of art, a memory, or an artifact of a particular culture, but it no longer gets to rule the imagination. It no longer gets to decide who belongs. It no longer gets to tell the nations that they are secondary. It no longer gets to make one group feel like host and everyone else feel like visitor. The living Jesus stands above the frame, and the frame has to become small.

This does not mean every conversation will be easy. People can become protective when familiar things are questioned. They may hear correction as attack. They may think that acknowledging Jesus was not white somehow insults them personally. But truth is not an insult. Truth is an invitation into worship that is less centered on us. If a person feels threatened by the historical reality of Jesus, that feeling may reveal how much cultural comfort has been tangled into faith. The answer is not shame. The answer is surrender. Lord, teach me to love You more than the version of You that made me feel important.

There is room for tenderness here. Many people never meant to distort Jesus. They were simply handed what others had been handed. They loved the image because they loved Him as much as they knew how. God sees that. He is patient with people who are learning. But patience does not mean leaving us unchanged. Grace does not mean every inherited assumption deserves protection. The Holy Spirit is kind enough to disturb what needs disturbing, especially when that disturbance makes more room for truth, humility, and love.

The fence begins to fall when we stop asking Jesus to look like the center of our world and start letting Him become the center of the world as it actually is. Not our imagined world. Not our preferred world. Not the edited world where our group is always right and our comfort is always holy. The real world. The world God so loved. The world of every nation, every language, every wounded family, every crowded apartment, every rural road, every prison cell, every refugee camp, every hospital bed, every quiet kitchen, every person who has wondered whether Jesus could possibly be near to someone like them.

He is near. Not because a culture granted Him permission to be near, but because He is Lord.

Chapter 3: When Jesus Refuses to Be Used

A man can sit at the kitchen table late at night with the television still flickering in the next room and feel something inside him grow tired. The house is quiet. The dishes are still in the sink. His phone is face down beside a stack of mail he does not want to open. He has spent the evening hearing people use the name of Jesus as if the Lord were a tool for winning arguments, a stamp for their side, a weapon to hold over enemies, or a decoration for whatever they already wanted to believe. He is not angry in a loud way. He is sad in a deep way, because somewhere beneath all the noise he still loves Jesus, and he knows the Jesus he has met in Scripture is not nearly as small as the version people keep dragging into public fights.

This is one of the hidden consequences of remaking Jesus into a familiar cultural image. Once people think He belongs to them in a special way, they begin to treat Him as available for use. If He is imagined as the face of their nation, then He can be used to sanctify national pride. If He is imagined as the face of their race, then He can be used to excuse racial arrogance. If He is imagined as the face of their political tribe, then He can be used to bless their anger and condemn everyone else’s. If He is imagined as the face of their lifestyle, their economic class, their tradition, or their preferred kind of church, then He becomes less like the living Lord and more like a mirror that never asks them to repent.

But Jesus refuses to stay in the mirror.

The Gospels show us a Christ who constantly steps outside the uses people have for Him. He does not allow the crowds to make Him king on their terms. He does not flatter the religious leaders who want Him to protect their status. He does not perform for Herod, even when Herod wants a sign. He does not answer Pilate in the way earthly power expects. He does not let His disciples turn greatness into domination. He does not let James and John call down fire on a Samaritan village. He does not allow Peter’s sword to define His kingdom. Jesus moves through human agendas with a freedom that should make every one of us tremble a little.

That freedom matters because we are all tempted to recruit Him. We may not admit it that way. We may not say, “I want to use Jesus.” But the heart has quieter methods. We look for verses that support what we already feel. We avoid passages that make us uncomfortable. We highlight His mercy when we want to excuse ourselves and highlight His judgment when we want to condemn someone else. We quote His compassion when we want approval and His holiness when we want control. We can even talk about the real Jesus while still trying to manage which parts of Him are allowed to speak.

A woman may notice this while sitting with her Bible open before work. She meant to read quickly, just enough to feel centered before the day began. Her coffee is cooling. Her calendar is crowded. A hard conversation is waiting for her at the office, and she already knows what she wants to say. Then she reads Jesus’ words about forgiving others, blessing enemies, removing the log from her own eye, and loving people who cannot pay her back. Suddenly the Bible does not feel like a comfort object. It feels like the living Word has placed a hand gently but firmly on the locked door inside her. She wanted Jesus to strengthen her case. Instead, He is searching her heart.

That is what the real Jesus does. He comforts, but He also searches. He strengthens, but He also corrects. He forgives, but He also calls us out of hiding. He is not cruel about it. He does not expose us to destroy us. He exposes what is false so that what is true can live. But this means He cannot be reduced to the version that only supports our preferred side of every conflict. If the Jesus we follow never challenges our instincts, never interrupts our anger, never questions our loyalties, never corrects our treatment of people outside our circle, and never asks anything costly from us, then we may not be listening to Jesus. We may be listening to an edited version of Him.

This is why the issue of Jesus being made white, American, or Western-looking reaches beyond appearance. The more a culture sees Jesus as naturally belonging to itself, the easier it becomes for that culture to stop hearing His rebuke. Familiarity can become a shield. People begin to assume that because Jesus looks like “us” in the imagination, He must also approve of “us” in the conscience. They forget that the Lord who loves them also stands over them. They forget that grace is not the same as favoritism. They forget that being used by God does not mean being immune from correction. They forget that God’s people in Scripture were often judged most severely when they confused election with entitlement.

The Bible is full of warnings against that kind of pride. Israel was chosen by God, but the prophets still confronted Israel’s injustice, idolatry, empty worship, and neglect of the vulnerable. The religious leaders in Jesus’ day knew Scripture, but Jesus still rebuked them when their knowledge became hypocrisy. The disciples walked with Him, but He still corrected their ambition, fear, misunderstanding, and hardness of heart. Being near holy things does not automatically make the heart holy. Being familiar with Christian language does not mean we are surrendered to Christ. Having Jesus in our art, songs, politics, family history, or public vocabulary does not mean we have allowed Him to be Lord.

A father may feel this when his child asks a question from the back seat that he is not ready to answer. They are driving home from a family gathering where someone spoke harshly about a whole group of people and then ended the meal with a prayer in Jesus’ name. The child has been quiet for several blocks, watching streetlights slide across the window. Then the question comes: “Dad, why do people talk about Jesus and then talk like that?” The father grips the steering wheel and feels the weight of the moment. He could make excuses. He could change the subject. He could say grown-up things are complicated. But he knows the child has heard the contradiction clearly. Sometimes children are the first ones in the room to notice when Jesus is being used to cover what Jesus would actually confront.

That question in the back seat is a mercy. It forces the adult to decide whether he will defend the family culture or honor the Lord. It asks whether Jesus will be treated as a name attached to tradition or as the living Christ who corrects how we speak about people. It brings the whole issue down from history and art into the ordinary place where discipleship actually happens. What do we say when the conversation turns cruel? What do we laugh at? What do we excuse because the person saying it belongs to our group? What do our children learn about Jesus from the way we treat people who are not in the room?

The real Jesus refuses to be used because He loves the people we are tempted to use Him against. He loves the stranger, the neighbor, the poor, the powerful, the wounded, the religious hypocrite, the outsider, the insider, the person from our group, and the person our group fears. His love is not sentimental approval. He calls all people to repentance. But His authority is not placed in our hands so we can declare ourselves clean and everyone else dirty. When Jesus gives us truth, He gives it first as a light that searches us. If we carry it outward without letting it shine inward, we become dangerous.

This is one reason the real historical identity of Jesus has such spiritual importance. Remembering that He was a Jewish man from the Middle East interrupts the fantasy that He began in our cultural center. It reminds us that we are the ones being welcomed into a story larger than ourselves. It reminds Gentile Christians that we have been grafted into promises we did not create. It reminds Western Christians that the faith did not start in the West. It reminds American Christians that the kingdom of God is not a religious version of America. It reminds every believer that the first movement of faith is not possession, but reception. We receive Christ. We do not own Him.

That reception should make us humble. It should make us careful. It should make us slower to speak for Jesus in ways that conveniently protect our own pride. It should make us willing to listen to believers from other backgrounds who may see blind spots we were trained not to notice. It should make us read Scripture with the awareness that our culture is not the measure of truth. It should make us ask better questions before we baptize our opinions with religious language. It should make us less interested in making Jesus useful and more interested in becoming faithful.

There is a difference between being comforted by Jesus and making Him convenient. Comforted means I bring my grief, fear, sin, confusion, and weariness to Him and let Him meet me in truth. Convenient means I keep the parts of Him that help me feel right and avoid the parts that call me to change. Comforted means I am still willing to be corrected. Convenient means correction always seems meant for somebody else. Comforted leads to worship. Convenient leads to self-protection with Bible verses attached.

A tired caregiver may understand this in a quiet, painful way. She has spent months taking care of an aging parent who was not always kind to her. She cooks, drives to appointments, manages medicine, answers repeated questions, and goes home with a body that feels older than it did a year ago. Some days she wants Jesus to give her permission to become bitter. She wants Him to say her resentment is justified and she owes no one tenderness anymore. Instead, He meets her with compassion for her exhaustion and also with a call not to let bitterness own her. He does not deny what she has carried. He does not shame her for being tired. But He also will not become a mascot for the hardness forming around her heart.

That is how Jesus refuses to be used on the inside of a person, not just in public culture. He will not let us use pain as permission to become cruel. He will not let us use betrayal as permission to never love again. He will not let us use fear as permission to despise strangers. He will not let us use truth as permission to become proud. He will not let us use grace as permission to avoid repentance. He will not let us use His name as permission to remain unchanged.

This can feel severe until we realize it is mercy. A Jesus who could be used by our worst instincts would not save us from them. A Jesus who simply agreed with our tribe, our pain, our anger, our ambition, and our blind spots would leave us trapped. The kindness of the real Christ is that He loves us too much to be recruited by what is destroying us. He stands before us with wounds in His hands and authority in His voice, and He calls us into a freedom deeper than getting our own way.

So when the old cultural image of Jesus begins to crack, we do not need to panic. We are not losing the Savior. We may be losing an idol. We may be losing a version of Jesus that made our group feel central, our assumptions feel safe, and our conscience feel undisturbed. That loss can be unsettling, but it can also be holy. Sometimes the breaking of a false image is the beginning of truer worship.

The kitchen table grows quiet. The television is off now. The phone still sits face down. The man looks at the unopened mail and then at the dark window over the sink where he can barely see his own reflection. Maybe that is where the prayer becomes simple. Lord, do not let me use You. Do not let me make You smaller so I can stay the same. Do not let me confuse my familiar world with Your kingdom. Teach me to follow You when You comfort me, and teach me to follow You when You correct me.

That prayer does not answer every public argument. It does not fix every distorted image overnight. It does not undo centuries of cultural confusion in one moment. But it opens a door in the right place. It begins with the heart surrendering its claim over Jesus and remembering that the only safe way to speak His name is on our knees.

Chapter 4: The Savior Who Meets People Outside the Frame

A young woman can sit on the edge of her bed with her laptop open, watching a worship service from another part of the world, and feel something in her chest loosen. The room around her is ordinary. A laundry basket is near the closet. A half-empty glass of water is on the nightstand. Her phone keeps lighting up with messages she does not have the energy to answer. On the screen, believers are singing to Jesus in a language she does not speak, with faces, voices, rhythms, and prayers different from the church world she grew up around. At first it feels unfamiliar. Then it feels holy. Not because it matches what she knows, but because it reminds her that Jesus was never waiting for her culture to give Him permission to be worshiped.

There is a healing that happens when we see the body of Christ as larger than the room that raised us. Many people have been taught, directly or quietly, that Christianity has a normal center and then other people are added around the edges. The center often looks like the people who had the most money, the most publishing power, the most political influence, or the most control over images and institutions. But the kingdom of God is not built around the comfort of the powerful. The risen Jesus sends His people into the world, and wherever the gospel is received, the worship of Christ rises in local voices, local tears, local songs, local kitchens, local griefs, local struggles, and local hopes.

That does not mean every expression of faith is automatically faithful. Every culture needs correction. Every church needs Scripture. Every heart needs repentance. But it does mean that no one culture gets to act like the original owner of Jesus. The West did not invent Him. America did not produce Him. Europe did not define Him. The modern world did not improve Him. He came before all of our systems, and He will remain Lord after all of them have fallen silent. When believers from different nations worship Him, they are not borrowing a Western figure. They are responding to the King who already rules over them.

This is especially important for people who have felt like following Jesus would mean becoming less themselves in every way. A man may have heard, from childhood, that Christianity belonged to colonizers, outsiders, or people who looked down on his ancestors. He may carry a guarded feeling whenever someone mentions Jesus because the name has been tangled with history, pressure, or humiliation. But then he begins reading the Gospels for himself. He sees a Jewish Messiah born under imperial power, not a Western ruler sitting above it. He sees a Savior who touches the unclean, speaks with the shamed, confronts religious pride, warns the rich, blesses the poor in spirit, and gives dignity to people others used. Slowly he begins to realize that the Jesus on the page is not the same as the cultural package he was told to reject.

That realization can be tender and unsettling. It can feel like finding a door where there used to be a wall. A person may not be ready to call himself a believer yet, but he may no longer be able to dismiss Jesus as easily as he once did. The old arguments do not fit as neatly because the real Christ stands apart from the sins committed in His name. That does not erase those sins. It does not excuse them. It does not tell the wounded to pretend history did not hurt. But it does say that Jesus is not guilty of every way human beings have misused Him. The one who was crucified by human power cannot honestly be reduced to a mascot for human power.

This matters for churches too. If a church forgets that Jesus meets people outside the familiar frame, it may accidentally teach people to pass through culture before they can reach Christ. It may expect converts to adopt certain habits, sounds, preferences, and social codes that are not actually the gospel. It may mistake discomfort with difference for concern about holiness. It may treat another culture’s worship as emotional, strange, excessive, cold, shallow, or unserious simply because it does not feel like home to the people making the judgment. But home is not the measure of truth. Christ is.

A pastor may notice this while visiting a small prayer gathering in a neighborhood his church rarely thinks about. The room is crowded. The chairs do not match. A child sleeps across two seats near the wall. Someone’s keys are jingling in a pocket. The prayers are not polished, but they are alive. A woman prays for her son in prison. An older man prays for work. A teenager prays for courage to stop lying. Someone reads from the Psalms with a trembling voice. There is no performance in it. No branding. No attempt to look impressive. The pastor may drive home afterward and realize that the kingdom was not waiting inside his preferred style. Jesus was already present in a room he almost never entered.

That kind of moment can correct the imagination without crushing it. It does not tell the pastor to despise his own church. It tells him to become less narrow. It tells him to stop measuring the nearness of Jesus by familiarity. It tells him that the Holy Spirit is not limited to the places where he feels fluent. It tells him that worship can be sincere without sounding like his worship, that faith can be deep without wearing his church’s clothing, and that the people of God are wider than the habits that make him comfortable.

The same truth can help an ordinary believer in daily life. We do not need to travel the world to begin honoring the real breadth of Christ’s kingdom. We can start by listening more carefully when believers from different backgrounds speak about Scripture. We can notice when our assumptions are cultural instead of biblical. We can be slower to call something unspiritual just because it is unfamiliar. We can teach our children that Jesus was Jewish, not as a trivia fact, but as a doorway into the faithfulness of God. We can read the Old Testament with gratitude instead of impatience. We can remember that the early Christian story moved through Jewish apostles, Gentile conversions, conflict, misunderstanding, correction, and grace.

A parent may begin at the dinner table. Maybe a child asks why Jesus does not look the same in every picture. Instead of brushing the question aside, the parent can say, “People have pictured Jesus in many ways, but the real Jesus was born into the Jewish people, in the Middle East, a long time ago. And because He is risen, people from every nation worship Him now.” That answer is simple, but it plants humility. It tells the child that art is not always history. It tells the child that Jesus is real. It tells the child that people around the world are not outsiders to God’s love. It also protects the child from growing up with the silent idea that one race or nation stands closest to Jesus by nature.

Children notice more than adults think. They notice which faces are shown as holy. They notice which accents are treated as intelligent. They notice which neighborhoods are treated as dangerous. They notice which countries are prayed for with compassion and which are spoken of with suspicion. They notice whether the church’s love for the nations is real or mostly decorative. If we want them to know the real Jesus, we must do more than tell them He loves everybody. We must stop letting our habits teach them that some people matter less.

This is not about shame. Shame rarely produces lasting holiness. This is about repentance that opens space for love. Repentance may look like changing the books we hand to our children, the examples we use when we teach, the assumptions we make about who is mature, the jokes we refuse to laugh at, the voices we are willing to learn from, and the prayers we pray for people outside our own circle. It may look like saying, “I did not realize how much of my faith imagination was shaped by my own culture, and I want Jesus to correct that.” That sentence is not weakness. It is discipleship.

There is also a comfort here for the believer who feels spiritually homeless. Maybe you love Jesus, but you have never fully felt at home in the Christian spaces around you. Maybe the songs, language, politics, images, and social habits made you wonder whether you had to shrink parts of your story to belong. Maybe you stayed quiet because you did not want to seem divisive. Maybe you kept showing up while feeling like a visitor. The real Jesus sees that. He does not ask you to pretend the discomfort was imaginary. He also does not ask you to give up on His body because parts of His body have been immature, proud, or careless.

Jesus knows how to meet people outside the center. In the Gospels, He often notices the person others have placed at the edge. He sees the woman at the well. He hears blind Bartimaeus. He stops for Zacchaeus. He welcomes children. He touches lepers. He praises the faith of a Roman centurion. He tells a story in which a Samaritan becomes the example of neighborly love. He lets a desperate woman reach for the hem of His garment. He is never confused by the social maps people draw. He knows where mercy is needed, and He goes there.

The church should look more like Him. Not rootless. Not careless with truth. Not embarrassed by Scripture. But humble, awake, and ready to recognize grace wherever Christ is truly at work. A church that remembers the real Jesus will care about sound teaching and also about who has been made to feel invisible. It will preach repentance and also repent of its own pride. It will honor the Jewish roots of the faith and also celebrate the nations gathered by grace. It will refuse to make Jesus a Western possession and refuse to make global faith a vague slogan. It will learn to say, with gratitude, that the Savior came through Israel and now calls the whole world to Himself.

The young woman on the bed keeps watching the worship service. She does not understand every word, but she understands enough. She sees hands lifted. She sees tears. She sees joy. She sees people singing to the same Lord she has been trying to know more honestly. For once, the unfamiliar does not feel like a threat. It feels like an invitation. It tells her Jesus is greater than the picture that once confined Him, greater than the culture that claimed Him, greater than the room where she first heard His name, and near enough to be worshiped in every faithful tongue under heaven.

Chapter 5: Letting the Real Jesus Correct the Room

A man can wake before the alarm, lie still in the gray light, and realize that the argument he had yesterday is still speaking inside him. The room is quiet, but his mind is not. He replays what was said, what he should have said, what he wishes he had not said, and how quickly the name of Jesus entered a conversation that did not sound much like Him. He reaches for his phone, then stops. The Bible is on the nightstand, partly covered by a receipt and a pair of glasses. He is tired of public noise, tired of cultural confusion, tired of people treating Jesus like property, and tired of finding that same temptation inside himself. So he sits up, opens the Gospel of John, and asks a simple question without dressing it up: Lord, who are You when I stop trying to make You useful?

That question may be one of the most honest prayers a person can pray. It does not come from a perfect heart. It comes from a heart that has started to notice its own habits. We often want Jesus to be clear enough to comfort us but not clear enough to correct us. We want Him close enough to bless our lives but not close enough to rearrange them. We want Him strong enough to defeat our enemies but gentle enough not to confront our pride. We want His mercy for our wounds, His approval for our plans, His silence about our blind spots, and His name on the things we already decided to do. Then the real Jesus steps into the room, and suddenly the room has to change.

That is what we need. We do not only need a more historically accurate imagination, though that matters. We do not only need better art, better teaching, better language, better awareness, or better conversations, though those things can help. We need the living Christ to correct the room of the heart. We need Him to stand among our inherited pictures, our family loyalties, our political instincts, our cultural habits, our private fears, our old resentments, our favorite excuses, and our religious memories, and say, “Follow Me.” Not follow the version that keeps everything in place. Not follow the version that never troubles the household. Not follow the version that only repeats what our side already says. Follow Him.

Following the real Jesus begins with humility. It begins when a person can admit, “I may have received some things about Jesus that were mixed with culture, pride, fear, or partial understanding.” That admission is not the same as rejecting everyone who taught us. It is not the same as becoming suspicious of every church, every family member, every old song, or every painting. It is simply honesty. We are human. We inherit faith through human hands. Some of those hands were loving. Some were careless. Some were wounded. Some were proud. Some were doing the best they could with what they knew. God can use imperfect people to point us toward Christ, but He still invites us to let Christ purify what they handed us.

A grandmother may have taught a child to pray beside a bed under a picture of Jesus that did not look historically accurate at all. That child may grow up and learn more, and he may realize the picture was not the real face of a first-century Jewish man from the Middle East. But he does not have to despise the grandmother’s prayer to tell the truth about the picture. He can say, “She gave me what she had, and now Jesus is leading me deeper.” That is maturity. It refuses both bitterness and blindness. It honors love without protecting error. It lets gratitude and correction live in the same room.

This is important because some people think truth must always arrive with anger. Sometimes anger is understandable, especially when false images have been used to wound people. But anger alone cannot form us into the likeness of Christ. If we only tear down a false picture without moving toward the real Person, we may end up with an empty wall and an unchanged heart. The goal is not to win an argument about what Jesus looked like. The goal is to worship the Lord as He truly is and to live differently because of it.

Living differently may begin in small places. It may begin with the way we speak about people who are not like us. It may begin with how we respond when someone challenges a tradition we love. It may begin with noticing whose voices we assume are trustworthy and whose voices we ignore. It may begin with reading the Bible more slowly, especially the parts that remind us Jesus came through Israel and not through our cultural center. It may begin with teaching children that the gospel is not owned by their nation, their race, their denomination, or their household. It may begin with apologizing when we realize we have used Christian language to protect an attitude that was not Christlike.

A woman may find this out at work during a lunch break. Someone at the table makes a careless comment about another coworker’s background, and the old version of her might have stayed quiet to keep peace. This time she feels the discomfort and chooses a different kind of faithfulness. She does not explode. She does not perform moral superiority. She simply says, “I do not think we should talk about people that way.” The table gets awkward for a moment. Someone changes the subject. Later she wonders whether she made things uncomfortable for no reason. But deep down, she knows something shifted. Jesus was not an idea in that moment. He was Lord over her mouth, her courage, and her willingness to stand apart from the familiar rhythm of the group.

That is where this topic becomes discipleship. It is one thing to say Jesus was not white, American, or Western-looking. It is another thing to ask what that truth requires from us. If Jesus is not ours to possess, then we must stop using Him to protect our circle. If Jesus came through Israel for the world, then we must love both the rootedness and the reach of the gospel. If Jesus stands above every culture, then we must allow Him to judge the sins of our own culture, not only the sins of others. If Jesus is Lord of the nations, then the church should be a place where dignity is not handed out according to cultural familiarity.

This does not mean becoming rootless. God places people in families, towns, nations, histories, languages, and communities. There is nothing wrong with loving the place where you live, the people who raised you, the songs that carried you, or the memories that shaped you. The problem begins when those gifts become measures of holiness. The problem begins when our home becomes the center of God’s kingdom in our imagination. The problem begins when we assume Jesus must feel most natural where we feel most natural. The problem begins when we stop letting Him question what we call normal.

The real Jesus makes all of us guests before He makes us family. We come with empty hands. We do not arrive as owners. We do not arrive as the center. We do not arrive with the right to decide who belongs at the table. We arrive by grace. We are forgiven by grace. We are adopted by grace. We are corrected by grace. We are gathered into a body we did not create and could never control. Once we understand that, it becomes harder to look down on other people standing at the same mercy.

This is why the Jewishness of Jesus should produce gratitude in Gentile believers, not defensiveness. The story of salvation did not begin with us. The Scriptures Jesus quoted, the promises He fulfilled, the Passover setting around His death, the hope of Messiah, the language of covenant, the meaning of temple, sacrifice, priesthood, prophecy, exile, return, and kingdom all come through Israel’s story. To ignore that is not only historically careless. It weakens our worship. We begin to treat Jesus as a free-floating spiritual figure instead of the fulfillment of God’s long faithfulness. But when we receive Him in the story God gave, our faith gains depth. The roots go down.

At the same time, those roots bear fruit for the world. The book of Revelation does not show one culture swallowing every other culture until only one human style remains. It shows worship from every tribe and language and people and nation. That means the final beauty of God’s redeemed people is not sameness under one earthly culture. It is unity under one Lord. The nations do not bring their pride into the kingdom, but neither does God seem interested in erasing the glory of redeemed human difference. The Lamb is worthy, and the worship around Him is wider than any one people could sing alone.

A hospital waiting room can become a quiet picture of that truth. People who would never share a church pew sit under the same fluorescent lights, waiting for news they cannot control. One family prays in English. Another whispers in Spanish. Someone else sits silently with prayer beads in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other. A nurse walks by with tired eyes. A child sleeps against an aunt’s shoulder. Pain has a way of stripping people of the illusion that they are in control. In a room like that, the idea of owning Jesus begins to sound ridiculous. What human group could possibly own the Savior needed by every trembling person in that room?

Jesus meets people there. Not as a Western symbol. Not as an American comfort object. Not as a pale face in a frame. Not as a mascot for the strong. He meets people as the crucified and risen Lord, the Jewish Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior of sinners, the One who knows the body, the blood, the grief, the fear, the waiting, and the cry for mercy. He is particular enough to be real and universal enough to be hope for the world.

So maybe the way forward is not complicated, even if it is costly. We let Jesus be Jesus. We stop defending every inherited image as if our faith depends on it. We stop acting as though questioning cultural distortions is an attack on Christ. We stop letting the loudest public uses of His name define Him for people who are still trying to see. We return to Scripture. We listen with humility. We repent where pride has hidden behind familiarity. We teach our children the truth with gentleness. We honor the people of Israel’s story. We welcome the nations without making them pass through our cultural preferences before they can reach the Savior. We let the Lord correct our rooms.

And when we do that, something beautiful begins to happen. Jesus becomes less useful to our pride and more precious to our souls. He becomes less like a figure we manage and more like the King we follow. He becomes less trapped in the frame and more alive in the Word, more present in prayer, more demanding in our choices, more merciful in our weakness, more powerful in our repentance, more worthy of trust, and more able to gather people we never would have gathered on our own.

The man in the gray morning light keeps reading. The house is beginning to wake. A car passes outside. Somewhere down the hall, a floorboard creaks. The day will still bring pressure, bills, conversations, temptations, and decisions. But something has changed, even if no one else can see it. He is not asking Jesus to stand inside his old assumptions today. He is asking for the grace to stand inside the truth. He is asking to follow the Savior who cannot be owned, reduced, recolored for convenience, nationalized, weaponized, or used. He is asking to know the real Jesus, and to become real before Him.

That is where freedom begins. Not in having the perfect image, but in surrendering the false one. Not in winning the argument, but in bowing before the Lord. Not in making Jesus look like us, but in letting Jesus remake us into people who look more like Him in mercy, truth, humility, courage, repentance, and love.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph Watch Douglas Vandergraph inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph Support the Christian encouragement library through GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-douglas-vandergraph-build-a-christian-encouragement-lib Support the daily work by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

In Summary: * Listening to general sports talk on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, while folding laundry. I'll stay with this station to listen to the radio call of tonight's Rangers vs. Twins game.

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.

Health Metrics: * bw= 239.97 lbs. * bp= 142/83 (58)

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

Diet: * 06:20 – coffee cake * 07:30 – 1 seafood salad and cheese sandwich * 12:30 – siopao * 14:30 – chicken lasagna

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:20 -watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:50 – start my weekly laundry * 15:40 – follow news from various sources while my laundry cycles through the machines * 17:00 – listening to general sports talk on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, while folding laundry

Chess: * 15:30 – moved in all pending CC games

When nations start spending like venture funds, the rules for startups change in ways most founders have not yet noticed.

I started investing more than twenty years ago, and the principal question was always the same: who is the buyer? The answer was usually a corporate IT department, a consumer, or eventually another investor. I learned to read capital the way other people read weather. You look at where it is accumulating, and you plan accordingly.

In 2026, I am looking at a pattern I have not seen before. The capital accumulating around artificial intelligence is no longer coming only from technology companies, growth funds, or ambitious founders. It is coming from governments, and it is coming at a scale that is beginning to change the competitive landscape for every startup I am evaluating right now.

Governments are now deploying capital like venture funds

France unveiled a €109 billion AI investment package, anchored in private sector commitments and framed explicitly as Europe's answer to the United States Stargate initiative. Japan announced a $6 billion sovereign AI program anchored in domestic semiconductor production and large language models built specifically for the Japanese language. The United Kingdom launched a £500 million Sovereign AI Fund in April 2026 and is opening £80 million in procurement contracts to startups as early as July. Canada announced a $2 billion national AI strategy on June 4, with funding earmarked for compute infrastructure and sovereign cloud systems.

These are not grants in the traditional sense. The UK fund takes equity stakes in British startups typically ranging from £5 million to £10 million per company, and pairs those investments with up to one million hours of supercomputing access. Procurement contracts structured through the same program run twelve to twenty-four months and are worth up to £5 million per project. That reads more like a seed round than a government initiative.

Global sovereign AI spending is now expected to surpass $100 billion in 2026. The nations moving fastest are not writing checks in the billions. They are making multi-year commitments that rival the industrial policy of any previous decade.

What government capital brings that private investment cannot match

The obvious contribution is money. But I think the more important asset is a kind of validation that is very hard to manufacture any other way. A startup that secures a government AI contract gets something no pitch deck can replicate: proof that a large, risk-averse institution evaluated its technology and trusted it with something that matters to the public.

In regulated industries, healthcare, finance, critical infrastructure, that kind of validation compresses the sales cycle with every subsequent enterprise buyer. It also creates a moat that is genuinely difficult to replicate quickly. You cannot spend your way to a government contract. You earn it through procurement processes that are slow by design and competitive for a reason.

The startups that understand this are not the ones pitching the most impressive demos. They are the ones that started building relationships with public sector buyers two or three years before those buyers had a budget to deploy. I have seen that pattern reward patient founders consistently.

The founders who benefit are a specific type

Sovereign AI is not an opportunity for every startup. It rewards founders with certain traits that are uncommon in the high-velocity culture that defined the last decade of technology investing.

Patience, first. Government procurement cycles are long. The UK's July 2026 competition will produce contracts lasting up to two years. That is a fundamentally different rhythm than a ninety-day enterprise sales cycle, and it requires a different kind of organizational stamina.

Data architecture discipline, second. Sovereign AI programs exist precisely because governments need AI that runs on data that cannot leave national jurisdiction. Startups that have always treated data design as a product decision, not a compliance formality, are well-positioned to compete.

Regulatory fluency, third. This is not about passing audits. It is about founders who understand that regulated buyers want to see how you think about risk, not just how your product performs in a controlled environment.

The companies I am watching most carefully in this space are not always the ones with the strongest benchmark scores. They are the ones whose founders can explain their architecture to a procurement committee and their roadmap to a technology minister on the same day.

The underlying dynamic never changes

Twenty years of investing has taught me that the technology changes, but the underlying dynamic does not. Every capital cycle is about identifying who the real decision-makers are before everyone else does, and building for those decision-makers before the competition notices they exist.

For a long time, the decision-makers in enterprise technology were a small group of CIOs and CFOs at large companies. In the last decade, developers became buyers and the entire go-to-market model had to be rebuilt. In 2026, governments have entered the room, simultaneously as buyers, investors, and long-term partners.

The startups that recognize this shift early, and build with the patience and precision that sovereign buyers require, will earn structural advantages that take years to replicate. That is exactly the kind of durable advantage worth looking for.

About the Author Alexander Kopylkov works at the intersection of venture building, investment, and business strategy. He shares insights on entrepreneurship, innovation, startup growth, and the evolving European technology ecosystem.

At least the early innings.

Tonight's MLB game of choice has my Texas Rangers playing the Minnesota Twins. The game's scheduled start time is 7:05 PM CDT.

Given my recent short sleeps, it's not very likely that I'll be staying awake for the full nine innings. I'll be caught up on the night prayers during the early innings, and if the brain starts shutting down before the game ends, I'll send myself directly to bed. Tomorrow morning will start early and it's important to be wide awake and fully alert to handle things. A good Monday night's sleep will go a long way to making Tuesday work well.

And the adventure continues.

They have advertising screens above urinals now?

A man cannot even pee in peace in this cursed hellscape of a timeline. The state of advertising in this batshit city is really getting out of hand.

#journal #cairo #egypt

Biter Fruit

Ban aan en ban uit, diverse smaken Biter fruit waar ik tijdens stroop tochten op ben gestuit een selectie van C vruchten op een moederbord wordt alle werkdagen op gezette tijden over me uitgestort een emmer Formatperen, Pingdas en Dosbessen daarmee kan ik mijn virtuele honger lessen Bitere vruchten geoogst op het immer uitdijende net zolang ik maar op mijn teller let aardnet chips en mocka cookies op een schaal staan op de schijf van vijf omgezet in digit taal die stillen knagende honger naar gegevens in ieder geval voor heel heel even laten de rust een moment lang wederkeren zodat alles wwwederom binnenstebuiten kan keren op zoek naar een verse oogst Bitere vruchten meedrivend op de wind van de allerdiepste zuchten zaden met peren die dan samen gaan vloeien en de oogst in een kweek mapje laten bloeien Simasappel in partities, de hangende appél bomen sappige maaltijden om levendig van te stromen de natuur kent een keur aan Bitere vruchten tal van maal tijden waarin iedereen kan vluchten van de ene realiteit in de andere verdwijnen achter ijzeren of hele luchtig ogende doch even harde gordijnen een leven lang aan herbeleven groeit in die grote kwekerij maar de sappigste vrucht voor hen daar aan de overkant ben jij.

3 June 2026

Getting back into the studio (and typing up the notes that accumulated along the way) after traveling for a week. Went to Venice for four nights in that time, saw the Biennale and the treasures at The Gallerie dell'Accademia, which I'll get into in upcoming posts. But I must first mention the marble relief maps on the Baroque facade of the Santa Maria Zobenigo, a 9th century (rebuilt in the 17th century by the architect Giuseppe Sardi) church directly across the street from the hotel I stayed in for my last night in the city.

The maps depict areas where the Venetian general Antonio Barbaro served (he funded the church's reconstruction). In contrast with so much of the Renaissance work I was seeing, they immediately stood out to me for their somewhat abstract treatment of representation and their secular content (side note: apparently John Ruskin was not a fan of the choice to adorn the facade with images of Barbaro's military exploits rather than religious symbols—he called it a “manifestation of insolent atheism”).

Anyway, they're really great. There are six of them, one for each of Candia, Zadar, Padua, Rome, Corfu and Split. In the Corfu piece, a cluster of gable-roofed homes almost tumble off of the surface. For Rome, a fortification wall protrudes from the right edge of the piece and appears to unfurl like a ribbon—that 1988 Paul Thek painting Untitled (Banner) came to mind. There actually are banners in the corners of the works that display the cities they depict, now that I think about it. But I spent the most time in front of the Split work, which is primarily comprised of hard-angled topographical lines arching over a wonky polygon to form an altar-like shape. Or a mandala melting from the bottom. It just reads as something both totemic and strange, which is a quality I'm am always drawn to. Lovely example of art arising from the space between a faithful eye and the limits of the hand/medium.