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.

---

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

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 advertising situation is really getting out of hand in this batshit city.

#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.

Omdenken in VerBitering

Ik lig muziek op bed onder een dikke laag internet op mijn kussen muisstil te roamen over woeste data stromen ik veeg me er wel mee af van het coren tot het kaft met een upgrade er boven op moederbord en dagmenu knop tilt ik er maar niet te zwaard aan lig ondanks dat overal voorbij te gaan met opgeblazen ventilatiesysteem blaas je zelden stof alleen ik lig muziek op bed cookie kruimels op mijn bed ik waai met alle wifi mee van land tot lucht en onder C ik dateer alle dagen over tijd in het wereldse groot AND diep NOT wijd klik voorlangs virtuele hindernissen deel privacy gevoelige gegevens met diep c vissen ik draai en woel in stand 0verhit blies die ventielator het maar uit maar in die bron groeit een ferme kluit opgehoopt stof van tijdverdrijf een verlengstuk van mijn lijf stickstof probleem in micro model van de punt commer in de kwel ik lig muziek op bed verdwenen in bed op internet vroeger opstaan om aan later ten onder te gaan alles behalve bloed en zenuwen streamt in deze bullshit baan ik stroom verhalen voor het roamen over ww rollen die niet onder scripts vandaan komen trollen, my little trojaanse pony en intelfectie vechten voor die ene plek in de virtuele vensterschool directie medeheerser, hoofdmanager stream verdeling onderdeel van de huidige omsingeling van het strijdpaneel om de ventielator strategische omwentelingen van de rotor zodat zij bepalen of het hoofd koel blijft of aan het verhit gemoet bezwijkt ik lag muziek op bed maar toen bezweek het laatste beetje net en alles werd met de blues collaps gereset daarna verdween de muziekte als ook het bed

On 16 June at 18:00 CEST | 17:00 WEST, Reading The Scene welcomes Edgar Secca, Chairman of the Board of Cooperative Árvore, for a one-hour online exchange with fellow cooperative practitioners and cultural professionals.

The session will offer an opportunity to share the project’s aims and ongoing questions, while exploring different approaches to cooperation, cultural management, and collaborative development across Europe.

As part of Reading The Scene’s commitment to fostering dialogue between solidarity and cooperative initiatives, the exchange will provide a space to learn from different organisational experiences, governance models, and approaches to collective cultural work. By connecting practitioners from different countries and contexts, the session aims to strengthen mutual learning, solidarity, and long-term cooperation within the wider ecosystem of artists, cultural workers, cooperatives and community-led organisations.

Edgar Secca has been a board member of Cooperative Árvore since 2013 and currently serves as Chairman of the Board, with responsibilities in financial management, cultural management, and artistic production. He is also involved with Strix, a company specialising in environmental and biodiversity services.

Founded in 1963 by a group of visual artists in Porto, Cooperative Árvore is one of Portugal’s longest-standing cultural cooperatives. Over more than six decades, it has developed a significant role in artistic production, education, exhibition-making, and cultural participation, becoming an important reference point for cooperative practice in the arts.

The conversation will be facilitated by Joana Macedo, a cooperative practitioner from Portugal and member of Shared Visions projects & O.U.R. Cooperative.

Date: 16 June 2026

Time: 18:00 CEST | 17:00 WEST

Format: Online

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/99146739657?pwd=VpmPBV3IsZxpRqZYe1v7qxlEy3Iczq.1

Ever since the day at the Maid Directorate, Mistress Maevin Maer's expectation of Henry Patton staying close had lessened. He wasn't sure if that was because she was trusting him more or she realized that having such a tight leash on him wasn't really helping. Either way, that was how he found himself in Belentine with only the maids Nish, Minda, and a new one he hadn't met named Teemai.

Of course, he was familiar with Nish. She was the Arch Maid for the Estate legion. She was quiet and reserved, more than he had seen of others but very strict. Her bob cut blond hair moved with the gentle breeze sweeping through Belentine as her sky blue eyes roamed over the crowd.

The other maid the young Terran was familiar with was Minda. That woman was an inventory maid if he remembered correctly so fell under Arch Maid Nish's authority. The red head with long, curly hair was quite memorable and not just because of a impressive chest which she never covered but how sweet she had been to him awhile ago.

The last maid present was someone new which wasn't a surprise. There were over four thousand people working on the massive Blue Blossom Estate so to think he knew them all would have been stupid.

From the quick explanation from Nish, Teemai was a higher ranking Stockpile Maid who handled a lot of the logistics for the estate. She was tagging along as she wanted to personally handle orders of the bespoke items that were going to be provided. In full transparency, it had been Henry that requested to tag along.

So, that was how he found himself walking down a street of gray cobblestone among the crowds and stalls of all different shapes and sizes thronged on both sides of him. I reminded Henry of the community marketplaces at home where people were selling their crafts and produce from their gardens. From what Nish had told him, a lot of these stalls were extensions of major shops as the Dovaela Market was meant to harked back to the ancient era of community. He definitely felt like we was among an old market square.

The strangest thing for him though was actually being among regular Xaltean citizens. It was a weird thing to say but they looked normal. T-shirts, jackets, clothing Henry would have expected at home but they had a distinct Xaltean cut to them. A lot of the shirts had the distinct asymmetric cut to them, the jeans riding lower on the hips for some. Henry did not realize how traditional the clothing on the estate was until he saw them.

They even have jeans! the young man thought to himself as a small, gaggle of people went by talking and laughing, their arms laden with shopping bags. Henry didn't feel quite so conspicuous anymore as he was wearing a simple tunic and slacks. In this marketplace, his maids stood out as strange though nobody gave them but a passing glance.

“Are you enjoying your outing?” Nish asked quietly on his left. Henry almost jumped forgetting how silent that woman moved.

“Yes!” Henry said with an emphatic nod. “I've never really been among citizens and it's fascinating to see the other side of the culture.”

“Did you not visit Belentine on your own a month ago?” Minda asked on his other side.

Oh, yeah. That was the time he sneaked out and didn't tell Maevin, then wound up running into a hostile houses' battle maid.

That was a fun day, Henry thought sarcastically. “Yeah but I was at the tourist spots so I saw more of my own people than yours.”

Minda nodded emphatically making her hair (and other things) bounce.

“Well, you are welcome to mingle,” Nish said with a rather stunning smile. “This area is pretty secure with cameras and there are no other houses visiting today. You are free to explore.”

“Thank you!”

“Though if my master will be considerate,” Nish continued. “to remain on this street until his maids are with him again. The other streets are more dense and I worry for you getting lost.”

She was probably worried about him being murdered by a rival but being polite about it.

“Sure. The street is pretty big. I got to look at.”

“You have access to your credit account if you wish to buy something,” Teemai said as she pulled out her computer pad to do her own shopping.

“And please refrain from buying another maid,” Nish added the humor in her voice. “I don't think the Mistress would be pleased if you did.”

So they heard about him just randomly purchase a maid contract. A flush of embarrassment covered his face. The woman was assigned to his third floor library as a attendant. Something close but not too close per Maevin.

“I'll try to behave. Promise.”

With the gentle reminders, the three women broke apart and vanished into the crowd on their individual missions leaving Henry to look at the sea of people, the sounds, and the delicious smell of food.

Food. That was a good idea. Looking around, his eyes landed on a stall that had what appeared to be a sausage like food in their glass display cases. His stomach growled in eagerness. Henry jingled the few credit chips he had in his pocket making sure they were there. He wanted to avoid using his credit account as much as feasible. The young man didn't want to give away who he was.

Striding over, the older man with gray hair and a thick mustache saw him coming and lit up.

“Hello! Thank you for coming to my stall,” the man said in a very accented English. He must have assumed he was a tourist.

“eta lusheeba mi xalta,” Henry said with a smile letting the man know he could speak Xaltean.

“Oh!” the main said with a big grin. “You speak it well!”

Henry smiled and nodded not wanting to give too much away. For the next few minutes they discussed the food and the young man let him think he was a tourist. It was easier that way as Henry didn't know how they would react if they found out he was the Lord of the Estate.

With a large sausage in hand in a butter bun, the Terran grinned. “This is delicious.”

“My friend works down the third street,” the man said pointing in the direction of a smaller and more densely packed street that broke off from the main one. “He serves a wonderful iced kaeva. It's much like the Terran coffee but with a very sweet spice to it.”

“I shall check that out!” And Henry meant it.

Making his way through the crowd, he found that the people were closer together due to the street being smaller. Everyone was still happily talking and Henry did not mind. It was nice to blend in for once than stand out. He had just located the kaeva stand that the sausage seller had told him about when he heard it.

“Hey, babe. Where you going?”

There was no accent and the inflection was correct. Henry's ears perked up immediately at the sound of his own mother tongue. Whoever was speaking, their voice carried. Henry began looking. There was a quieter voice speaking but the young lord couldn't make it out.

“Don't run away, my friends an I are just trying to get to know you better.” There was a bit of laughter and instantly the hair on Henry's neck stood on end. There was something predatory in that sound.

Shit, he thought to himself as he began pushing his way through the crowd. As a collective, said crowd was shifting away from the disturbance and he could see the nervous and concerned looks on their faces.

When he broke through the crowd, Henry Patton saw the layout of an open air cafe. A lot of the customers were getting up and moving away from the problem out front. Four men who seemed to be ranging between their early to mid 20s had a young woman in a blue shirt and matching shorts in the middle. The one with a buzz-cut had his arm around her pulling her close. The discomfort and fear was written all over her face.

“Let's go have a drink,” the one was saying while the other was elbowing his friend. They were nudging the scared woman down the street.

The anger that burst through Henry was palpable. It started in his gut and burned up through his chest. It was a fury that he could never remember experience before. The world seemed to narrow and sharpen, his heart beating harder in his chest as she balled his fists together until his knuckles were white.

“Hey!” Henry yelled in English forcing his way towards them. “Get the fuck away from her.”

Where was this coming from? Back home or even at the estate he would have never acted like this but seeing the fear in her eyes just made something snap inside. The four turned to look with a mixture of irritation and anger but still not having let go of the the woman.

“Mind your own business,” The one who appeared to be the leader said. “This has got nothing to do with you.”

Nothing to do with him? These people were under the protection of Blue Blossom Estate and House Patton-Avernell. It had everything to do with him. In the haze of fury and Adrenalin, Henry realized that understanding that made him angry.

“I said get the fuck away from her,” Henry growled again now only six feet from them. Two of the larger ones blocked his way and immediately his brain went into overdrive.

There were four total, two large and two small. Like any male in the Holy Innocentia, he did two years of mandatory service in the military so he had some basic self defense. Thanks to Tox also teaching him a bit, Henry knew he wasn't going to go down without a fight. Yes, he could have backed off but the fury inside him wouldn't let him. She was a citizen of his planet.

Henry did not wait but stepped in and threw a punch straight at the largest stomach. He was not expecting it as he doubled over and found Henry's knee coming up to connect with his face. That one dropped to the ground clutching his broken nose that was gushing blood.

The young lord did not have a chance to move as the other's fist connected with the side of his head. Stars exploded into his vision and he stumbled back but fighting his brothers on the farm had taught him to keep going. He lowered his head and rammed the other lifting him up and over his shoulder to slam hard on the ground.

Another blow landed in his back and the others joined forcing Henry. He spun to face them, his face screaming in pain. That was going to swell.

The three were standing there seething angry squaring up on him while the other was holding his face as blood poured out.

It was the movement to his left that he turned to see racing through the crowd the three maids. There was a mixture of fear and determination on them. Before Henry even thought about it, he pointed directly at them causing them to stop.

“No.” Henry said with uncharacteristic commanding voice. The trio looked at each other and he could see the war in their eyes of listening or disobeying him.

“I don't know who you think you are,” the leader said stepping forward having shoved the girl away. She had escaped into the crowd and was now watching. “but you made a mistake.”

Henry grinned (which hurt). “You have no idea the mistake you've made.”

They came at him and Henry did not hesitate to fly forward and ram into them. He swung hard remembering everything that Tox and the military taught him. Only one of them seemed to have any training and that was the leader. The attack was so abrupt that another went down with a hard kick to the groin and the third backed off raising his hands in surrender.

Henry threw himself at the last and they went down in a cloud of fists and kicks. All Henry could think of was making this person pay for the way he acted against his people. It felt like forever but probably only a few minutes but the Terran Lord found himself on top of the bloodied body of his opponent and he kept raining punches down on him.

“Don't every touch my people again,” Henry shouted, punctuating each word with a blow.

There was a whistle and through bleary eyes he could make the uniforms of police officers rushing forward. One went to rip Henry off and tackle him but he did not succeed. As he reached out, two forms blurred close, re-directed his hand and then shoved the officer back just enough to stop his movement.

Nish was at his side, hand outstretched while Teemai was pulling him up and Minda was shielding him.

“Do not touch, your Lord,” Nish warned without raising her voice.

The officer glanced at Henry and the realization sunk in. He bowed awkwardly and ran over to an older officer. He must have told him who he was as that older man came over and gave a much more formal bow.

“My lord,” he said his words not as quiet as Henry had hoped. A ripple shot through the crowd as the realization swept over them. Henry wiped the blood from his split lip looking at the men restrained by the police.

“Since they assaulted you, shall we hand them over to your security?” The officer asked.

Henry shook his head, the pain started hitting as the Adrenalin wore off.

“No. Get them off my planet.”

---

When the shuttle landed back at Blue Blossom and the hatch opened, Henry knew the story had gotten back.

Of course it did.

Mistress Maevin Maer was standing there in her summer outfit of white cloth, emotions ranging from rage and worry on her face. Doctor Torbet, their estate's physician, was there along with Tox and a few other high ranking maids.

“Master,” Maevin said stepping up and offering a hand as he stumbled. Her dark hair was caught by the wind for a moment reminding Henry how beautiful she was.

“Leave Nish and her maids alone,” Henry said as the trio stepped out with fear in there eyes. He knew that they were scared of what Maevin would do to them. “I gave them a direct order to not get involved and they did their duty and obeyed me.”

Maevin shot a glance at Nish who quickly bowed and then the mistress motioned with her head to dismiss the three. Maevin led him quickly into the building and he soon found himself in his office and sitting in his chair. The woman knelt down in front of him taking the antiseptic cloth offered by Doctor Torbet and began to dab at his lip. His face was really starting to hurt. Torbet came over and began to apply a adhesive bandages that felt cool and numbing to the swollen parts of his face.

“That was very barbaric,” Maevin gently chided him as she handed the bloody cloth to torbet and began to use another one.

Henry tried to shrug but everything was hurting even worse.

“Well, it was a small incident,” He finally got out.

“There is a recording,” Torbet said. “Belentine has security cameras and police drones. The fight was filmed and on the news within thirty minutes of you leaving. You're the story of the day. Probably gonna want to draft a letter to our High Baron cause it's gonna get to him.”

“That is an issue for later,” Maevin said with a thin warning in her voice. The doctor gave a nod and stepped back waiting.

“Look, they were harassing that poor girl,” Henry said trying to explain himself. “I couldn't just let them.”

“I know,” Maevin said. “but brawling?”

“I wasn't thinking.”

There was a hint of a smile in the corner of Maevin's mouth and her eyes were bright. “Well, you have made an impression, My master.”

As she worked on him, Henry glanced at the door and saw a few eyes looking in and quickly trying not to look like they were. Maevin glanced and sighed.

“Dismiss the maids and close the door, Doctor.”

Henry could hear the whine of frustration from the other maids as the door clicked.

“What's that about?”

“Well, you're every woman's fantasy now.”

“What?!?” Henry started and immediately regretted the quick movement.

Maevin nodded. “I have studied Terran literature and you have a trope of the damsel in distress and the charming prince to rescue, yes?”

“Umm...yeah,”

“Our trope is a bit different. In our culture, it is the civilized woman who is swept off their feet by a barbarian that doesn't care for status, ceremony, or protocol. A Xaltean man would never have brawled in the street like that and now there is footage of the Lord of Victory pummeling brigands for the sake of a woman.”

“I would not be surprised if there are some inquiries on possible marriages or even requests for fathering a few children,” Torbet added, a glint of amusement in his eyes.

“What? No!”

Torbet snorted in laughter while Maevin's smile grew just a bit bigger.

“If anything, it's going to be harder to have the maids keep their clothes on,” Maevin sighed. “They're gonna definitely want your attention now.”

In a way Henry didn't mind. He had always wondered if you could do what it took to protect everyone here and this proved it. This place felt like home and this was where he wanted to be as long as he could.

At some point in 2023, Vista Palms HOA went from HOA Board-occupied-by-residents-in-control to property management-controlled. Seemingly, after our original HOA president moved, everything went to hell. I don’t know why we hired a property management group, namely Unique Property Services, Inc. But I do know that property management groups allow HOA Board members to act like they are not responsible for the bad things that happen as a result of “the property manager’s decisions”.

When the Unique Property Services, Inc.—aka the property manager—took over this community, he booted out all of the homeowners previous automatic payment arrangements. In my case, I had had ACH set up for at least 6 years so that my monthly assessments went from my bank straight to the HOA. This was the best thing for me. Prior to that, I used to use payment coupons that we got in the mail to mail in the dues. That was very archaic.

How were homeowners originally notified of this new situation? I don’t know…A Board meeting? The Facebook page (which was also full of various neighborhood rumors and accusations)? I didn’t attend meetings and I didn’t do social media. What I do know is that I was never mailed anything and no one ever directly informed me. I live in this neighborhood 365 days a year. I discovered it by happenstance one day when I checked my miscellaneous email address searching for some old TECO account information. This was more than six months later. Eight-hundred and sixty-seven dollars later, to be exact.

My wife got me a MacBook Neo for my birthday and I love it so far. It’s light, like the Touch ID button, and it works pretty fast. Definitely an improvement from my last MacBook.

While I like Linux as a backup OS, I’ll stick with MacOS as my primary. Haven’t used Windows since they introduced Windows 11 and I’ll never will unless absolutely necessary.

Maybe I’ll talk more about my previous laptops on another post.

#apple #laptop #linux #MacBook #MacOS #windows