Month: January 2026

Pam, the boys, and my friends will tell you that I have a tendency to get stuck on certain topics and themes that I find fascinating or important. If you and I have a conversation, there’s a very good chance I’ll start talking about the economic theory of signaling. I wrote about it thirteen years ago (HERE), and I haven’t stopped bringing it up since.

One of the themes I’m focusing on right now is friction—or maybe better said, resistance, tension, those little bits of relational drag that make interactions human. Over the past few years, I keep hearing more and more about the push to make our experiences “frictionless.”

The Appeal of Frictionless Relationships

A recent example: the February 2025 episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily titled She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. You can listen HERE and read the transcript HERE. The episode isn’t really about relational resistance, but it highlights the appeal of an AI partner being completely smooth—no pushback, no conflict, no rough edges. Here’s the key idea they raise:

One of the concerns about these types of relationships with an AI chatbot is there’s not the same friction that you have in a human relationship. You’re not going to get in fights with it. It’s not going to disagree with you. It’s not going to be mean to you. It’s not going to ghost you. You’re not dealing with all the normal parts of being in love and in a relationship with a human being. There was a concern that you might get used to that lack of friction, the idea of a partner who just constantly responds to you, that’s constantly affirming you, so empathetic with you, more empathetic than another human being is capable of being. What relationship might that lead us to expect?

And honestly—who wouldn’t want less friction in a relationship? A “partner” who agrees with everything you say and never challenges you sounds… convenient. But of course, that isn’t a real human relationship. Real relationships involve two autonomous beings with their own wills.

When Smoothness Becomes a Moral Imperative

Somewhere along the way, we’ve turned friction into a moral problem. And once something is labeled a problem, the “right” thing to do becomes eliminating it. So we chase smoothness in everything. We create AI relationships. We text instead of calling because hearing someone’s voice feels stressful. We streamline our retail experiences to remove as much awkward human interaction as possible—self-checkout is just easier.

If resistance shows up, our instinct is to solve it.

Walter Brueggemann talks about this in his article Counterscript: Living with the Elusive God. He writes:

The dominant script of both selves and communities in our society…is the script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism…

We encounter difficulty—and assuming every difficulty is fixable—we reach for the usual tools. We medicate bodily discomfort. We buy things to soothe emotional stress. We try to engineer away the bumps, snags, and tensions of being human.

The Necessity of Resistance

But here’s the thing: resistance isn’t always bad. In fact, having none of it is its own kind of problem. Life requires a little friction.

I love to mountain bike. Too much drag makes everything difficult. But too little grip? That’s even worse—sliding all over the trail, losing control, and eventually wrapping yourself around a tree. The right amount of traction is what makes the ride work.

Maybe we stop trying to avoid every awkward or uncomfortable social interaction. Maybe we lean into spending more time with actual people, knowing things won’t be perfectly smooth—but knowing, too, that the bumps and resistance are what shape us, steady us, and make our relationships real.

When I was a kid, I loved watching Hogan’s Heroes. There are plenty of things that could be said about the show—some good, some not so good—but lately I’ve been thinking about Sergeant Schultz and one line he repeated constantly:

“I know nothing.”

For Schultz, it was all about plausible deniability. If he knew nothing and saw nothing, he figured he couldn’t be blamed for anything. I’m not entirely sure how well that strategy would have worked for a real WWII POW camp guard, but it did make for some genuinely funny moments on the show.

But I haven’t been thinking about his catchphrase in terms of plausible deniability. I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pastoral ministry.

When I Assume I Know Nothing

I am at my best as a pastor when I begin by assuming I know nothing.
When I assume I know nothing, I listen better.
When I assume I know nothing, I make fewer assumptions.

I even have a Michael Scott quote on my cup to remind me how little I actually know and understand on any given day.

The Temptation of Experience

The problem, of course, is that I do know some things. I have years of experience and training—gifts I’m genuinely grateful for, and gifts that help the people I serve. But those same gifts can also tempt me to jump ahead in the story, to assume I already know how a situation will end because I’ve “seen this circumstance before.”

Instead of staying present in the moment, I can get pulled into the illusion that I already have the answers.

Which is why it helps—deeply helps—when I intentionally start by assuming I know nothing. When I do that, I actually listen. I listen to understand what is really going on, not what I expect to be going on. And when I’m listening well, I am a far better minister.

Socrates and the Wisdom of Not Knowing

Socrates was once considered the wisest person in Athens because of one simple insight:

“I know that I know nothing.”

That single admission made him wiser than those who believed they already knew something—because their certainty kept them from actually learning anything.

I’m discovering the same thing in ministry.
The less I assume I know, the more I am able to receive.
The more I am willing to not know, the more deeply I can listen.
And the more deeply I listen, the more faithfully I can serve.

I really like the Fargo series. It’s a dark comedy that hits home for me—not just because of where I live, but because it digs into themes I think really matter. It’s definitely not for everyone; the show can be violent. But the fifth season has started, and even though I’m only two episodes in, I’m already connecting with it again.

Enter Sheriff Roy Tillman

In the second episode, we get a better introduction to Jon Hamm’s character, Sheriff Roy Tillman. Tillman is a “constitutional” sheriff who believes that being elected makes him the law—judge, jury, and executioner whenever he thinks a “wrong” has been committed.

At one point, while talking with an assassin he hired to kidnap his runaway wife, he explains his worldview with this line:

“If a man is pure, his actions are only ever good.”
(ht TV Show Transcripts)

Roy sees himself as pure—so whatever he does is good, no matter how harmful those actions would look coming from anyone else.

When Fiction Mirrors Real Life

The unfortunate part is that this mindset isn’t limited to a fictional character. We see versions of it everywhere: “Good people only do good things, and we’re the good people, so our actions are good.” And the reverse: “They’re evil, so whatever they do is evil.”

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt even identify this as one of society’s “great untruths”: the belief that life is a battle between good people and evil people. This thinking leads us to assume that anything our “side” proposes is good, and whatever the “other side” suggests must be bad.

The Danger of Assumed Righteousness

Public theologian Reinhold Niebuhr framed it this way:

“The worst human conflicts are conflicts between righteous men who are too self‑righteous to know how evil they are.”
— Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), Doom and Dawn

Assumed righteousness can justify all kinds of harm, all in the name of “the good.” I get genuinely uneasy when people start claiming they’re the good ones—and that whoever they oppose must be the bad ones.

One of my favorite things each week is meeting with a group I belong to that reads a book and discusses it from our faith perspective. Since the group usually—but not always—reads about faith and science, it’s jokingly called Heretics. It still makes me laugh when I look at my calendar and see: “Heretics at Starbucks, 6 a.m. Tuesday.”

Right now we’re reading The Need to Be Whole by Wendell Berry. Much of what Berry writes has struck me—unsurprising, given his ability as both writer and thinker—but there’s one paragraph in particular that has stayed with me and shaped a lot of my conversations this past week:

“People are encouraged by advertisements, experts, and insinu­ation everywhere in our consumer culture to believe that what they have is inferior to what they might have, and what they are is infe­rior to what they might be. So they are lulled and tolled into an economy of replacement without limit, discarding meanwhile all that our cultural heritage has to tell us about our need to be recon­ciled to the limits imposed upon us by partiality and mortality, and our obligation to live well within those limits. When you have suc­ceeded so far in having a better face, a better body, a better house, a better car, and a better spouse or “partner,” then what you have is again inferior to what you might have, and so the cycle must begin again. People thus become ideal consumers. But how can they think well of themselves, whose lives are forever inferior and disposable?”
—Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole, p. 22.

The phrase I’ve been using to sum up my thoughts is that we live in a culture of inferiority—a culture that tells us that no matter what you have or do, it’s always inferior to what you could have or do. You can always be more, and once you’ve become more, you can be even more still. Improvement itself can be wonderful, but this culture of inferiority is suffocating. It destroys life rather than enriching it.

You buy a new car, and next year a new model appears. After a few years you “need” another one because yours has become obsolete—after all, it’s about the safety of your family. You buy a new smartphone, and six months later a newer one promises features that will “change your life” and make you more effective. Our economic system thrives on this: whatever you have is automatically inferior to whatever is coming next.

So why wouldn’t we shape our lives around this lie too? No matter how much you’ve improved, that improvement only reveals the next thing you still need to fix. Read more books, learn more skills, redeem more time, optimize more everything. On and on it goes.

Don’t mishear me—improvement isn’t wrong. Far from it. Great things come from growth and skill and practice. But your improvement each year, month, week, or day does not determine your value. I believe the Creation story, and Jesus Himself, say the opposite. You bear the image of God. You are loved by the Lord.

The musician, producer, professor, and all‑around swell guy Steve Taylor wrote a song in 1993 titled “Cash Cow (A Rock Opera in Three Small Acts).” It ends with these lyrics:

Perhaps you’ve already been licked
I, too, was hypnotized by those big cow eyes
The last time I uttered those three little words
“I deserve better!”

In the song, Taylor satirizes an economy in which people are enslaved by the constant belief that no matter what they have, “I deserve better!” It’s a lie that constantly feeds on itself. More and better. Better and more. Enough and finished are words that don’t exist in the economy.

I’ve been thinking lately that addiction to the phrase “I can do better” works the same way. It may sound more virtuous, but it can be just as destructive. It becomes a relentless taskmaster, wearing down the very people who try to serve it.

Meanwhile, the Lord of the Sabbath offers something entirely different—rest. His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.

It is Martin Luther King Day. On MLK Day I try to read something from him—usually Letter from Birmingham Jail. This year, though, I ran across a quote from his Montgomery Bus Boycott speech in the book I’m currently reading for the “Heretics” group (the name has a fun story behind it), and it intrigued me enough to go read the entire speech.

In this speech, Dr. King was preparing the community for what would happen during the boycott and how people would respond to it. The quote that really caught my attention was this:

“Let us be Christian in all of our actions. But I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love; love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.”

If justice comes out of love (and I believe it does), then love has to guide our motivations, our actions, and our tactics. When love is the foundation, you can’t fight with the weapons of the enemy—because if you do, you’ve already lost. But that doesn’t mean you don’t fight. You have to. Love will always revolt against that which is not love. It has to.

One of my goals for 2026 is to start blogging again. It isn’t really the thing anymore—I guess if I wanted to be on trend, I’d start a Substack or something else that has appeared since I last looked around. But the reason I want a blog is simple: writing helps me focus my thoughts. This is a way for me to do that.

So, to whoever wanders through the interwebs and accidentally finds this, remember: this isn’t really for you… it’s for me… so get over it.

That sounds more aggressive than I intended.

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Discovering Simone Weil

At the end of 2024, I read Simone Weil for the first time. The book was The Love of God & Affliction. I found her writing fascinating, and naturally I kept reading. Now, after only a year with her work, I can safely say I still know next to nothing about her thought.

The podcaster Dan Carlin likes to describe himself on Hardcore History as “not a historian, but a fan of history.” That’s how I would describe my relationship with Weil right now. I’m not a Weilian—just a fan of Weil.

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Love as Attention

One of the ideas that has really stayed with me is her understanding of love as attention. She writes extensively about attention, but this one line captures its essence:

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

One of the few voluntary acts we truly have is choosing what we give our attention to—or choosing whether we allow someone or something else to claim it. This becomes even more important in a world where attention has become an economic commodity.

The attention economy is built on the belief that attention is scarce. Because of this, companies fight to capture as much of it as possible. Websites and services are designed to keep you there for as long as they can, because your attention serves their purposes.

And when our attention is fixed there, we ignore what—and more importantly who—is right in front of us.

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What We Fail to See

Sometimes that’s precisely the point. The “bread and circuses” of Rome kept people distracted, their attention fixed on spectacle rather than substance. Much of Simone Weil’s writing on attention highlights how easily we overlook the suffering around us—and how suffering continues because we refuse to see it.

She writes:

“The afflicted need nothing else in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.”

We choose not to focus our attention on the suffering before us, and therefore we comfortably do nothing about it. We choose not to see. Giving our attention to the afflicted is dangerous to the status quo.

The same is true in how we respond to those who cause harm. We focus on the evil they do and overlook the fact that they, too, bear the image of God. This doesn’t mean we don’t confront the evil, just that we don’t neglect to see the perpetrator as someone who also exists under Jesus’ grace.

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Attention and the People We Love

And of course, the same is true for the people closest to us—the ones we claim to love. Many of us carry devices in our pockets that promise endless capabilities. All they ask in return is our attention, and we hand it over freely.

So we sit in a car—whether for a long drive or a short one—and give our attention to our phones instead of the person beside us. We drift into the world Sherry Turkle described so well in Alone Together: sitting in public spaces (though we do that less and less) without interacting, because our devices have claimed our focus. We read our books, watch our movies, and go to our concerts with our attention willingly dragged off from the moment into another direction.

We don’t see anyone—including those we love most—because we’ve handed our attention to people, companies, and systems that want to use it for their own ends.

Attention is an act of love.

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So What Do We Do?

So what do we do? The simplest answer is to begin giving our attention to the people around us. Of course, this is difficult. Habits are hard to change, especially when the person you’re trying to focus on is also conditioned to give their attention away.

But try anyway. Put down whatever you’re doing when you choose to give someone your attention. When it feels awkward or uncomfortable, remember: this is what it feels like to practice something you’re not used to. Keep going.

In my faith, love is described very simply as sacrifice. Jesus on the cross is the greatest example of love in my tradition. Giving your attention to something meaningless is easy. But if attention is love, then it requires sacrifice—and sacrifice rarely comes easily.

Easy things are rarely good for us. Sacrifice usually is.