Menu
Cart

MAJORHDALTON

About MAJORHDALTON

http://faithforareason.com

Posts by :

Man writing letter at wooden table indoors, closeup

Faith or Full Surrender

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34)
In his final message, written as aggressive prostate cancer was ending his life, Scott Adams addressed his Christian friends who had urged him to “find Jesus” before he died. Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, had spent his career analyzing systems, probabilities, and strategic decision-making. He approached the question of faith the same way.
“I’m not a believer,” Adams wrote clearly, “but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive.”
This approach to faith is known as Pascal’s Wager. Faith as cost-benefit analysis. The cultural promise: you can obtain eternal security through a low-cost transaction. Say the words. Hedge your bets. Cover your bases. If you’re wrong, you’ve lost nothing. If you’re right, you’ve gained everything. It’s the ultimate insurance policy.
Adams proceeded to execute the transaction: “So, here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him.”
Then came the admission that exposes the emptiness of this approach: “The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won’t need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.”
Notice the progression: I’m not a believer… but I’ll say the words… if I wake up in heaven, then I’ll believe… I hope I’m still qualified. Adams articulated exactly what transactional faith produces: words without transformation, confession without conviction, a declaration without discipleship.
The cultural promise of Pascal’s Wager sounds reasonable: make a rational calculation, minimize risk, maximize potential gain. It treats salvation like portfolio diversification. But here’s what the promise doesn’t tell you—the hidden cost it carries: You can purchase insurance without ever meeting the Insurer. You can say the words without surrendering your heart.
Adams was honest enough to state what many people only think: “I’m not a believer.” He said the formula. He spoke the transaction. But he remained fundamentally unchanged, hoping the technicality of his words might qualify him for entry if it turned out to be real.
This is faith as fire escape, not faith as following. Faith as legal loophole, not faith as love relationship. Faith as last-minute transaction, not faith as total transformation.
Jesus offers something completely different. He doesn’t say, “Acknowledge me as a good risk-reward calculation.” He says, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” He doesn’t say, “Repeat this formula and hedge your eternal bets.” He says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself.”
Inspired by the Spirit, the Apostle Paul taught that “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Notice: confession with your mouth and belief in your heart. Not one or the other. Both. Words that emerge from belief. External confession that matches internal conviction.
Jesus doesn’t want your risk-mitigation strategy. He wants you. Not your words as insurance. Your heart as surrender. Not your calculated hedge. Your complete trust.
The cultural promise of transactional faith requires nothing and delivers nothing. The Gospel promise requires everything—and delivers Christ himself.

baby_bump.webp

Baby Bumps: Training for Pregnancy Like It’s a Marathon

“Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves.” (Psalm 127:1–2)

There is a growing movement among young women in America that promises total control over one of life’s most uncontrollable mysteries: conception and pregnancy. According to a 2025 report in WIRED magazine, a wave of social media influencers and holistic health coaches have branded the months before pregnancy as the “zero trimester”—a preparation window they say women must optimize through curated diets, supplement regimens, environmental purges, and courses costing up to $1,770. The hashtag #preconceptionhealth appears in over 100,000 Instagram posts. Individual TikTok videos on pregnancy prep have racked up over 13 million views. The message is seductive in its simplicity: “Healthy pregnancy isn’t chance—it’s choice.”

Consider Esther Rohr, a twenty-six-year-old wedding photographer from Oregon. Rohr has never tried to conceive. She has no known fertility issues. Yet she has spent three years overhauling her entire life in preparation: swapping synthetic workout clothes for natural fibers, replacing nonstick pans, unplugging Wi-Fi at night, undergoing a controversial OligoScan for heavy metals, completing two rounds of a cellular healing diet, and taking six to eight supplements daily. She described the process in her own words: “It was a brutal, brutal year.” Three years of preparation. No attempt at conception.

The influencers driving this movement frame pregnancy preparation as empowerment. Alexandra Radway, a functional nutritional therapy practitioner with a growing Instagram following, sells a “Baby Ready Body Book Bundle” for $97 and live courses promising to “balance your hormones, boost your energy, calm your nervous system, and prepare your body for a healthy pregnancy.” One of her signature recommendations? Watching sunrises. “It’s the equivalent of, like, 2,500 Brazil nuts of antioxidants,” she claims. “Everyone’s focusing on super foods. I’m like, ‘No, super sunrise.’”

But some experts in the field offer a different assessment. Dr. Natalie Clark Stentz, a reproductive endocrinologist at Michigan Medicine, offers a blunt assessment: “Any buzzy individual thing is likely sensational, whether that’s Brazil nuts, organ meats, or whatnot. The evidence-based things, they’re not sexy.” A 2025 study found that only five percent of the nutritional claims made on preconception social media accounts were supported by international guidelines. Fifty-four percent had no evidence at all. Dr. Kara Goldman, a fertility specialist at Northwestern University, warns: “You’re taking a very vulnerable, very highly motivated population of patients and targeting them with information that is kind of driven by financial incentives.”

“The evidence-based things, they’re not sexy.”

Here is what the promise ultimately delivers. Under an Instagram post promoting a book called 9 Months That Count Forever: How Your Pregnancy Diet Shapes Your Baby’s Future, one commenter wrote: “I feel so much guilt for not eating well during pregnancy. Definitely a bit triggered by this.” Another typed: “Well I threw up sometimes 10X a day until she was born so… Prayers.” The movement that promised empowerment ultimately delivered shame.

In the article, sociologist Miranda Waggoner, who actually coined the term “zero trimester” identified the problem: this trend “promotes the idea that there’s a causal and deterministic link between preconception care behaviors and birth outcomes, and that’s where I think it can be problematic.”

The promise was control. The cost is guilt for what was never controllable in the first place.

Rohr herself captures the theology at work beneath the lifestyle hacks: “Not knowing things is very uncomfortable for me.” That is not a statement about pregnancy preparation. That is a confession about the human condition—an admission that the deepest discomfort is not physical but existential. We cannot bear the uncertainty, so we build systems of control and call them wisdom.

Culture says a healthy pregnancy is a choice—optimize harder, spend more, control everything. Jesus says something radically different: “Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” Preparation is wise. Stewardship of the body is good. But when preparation becomes a system of control designed to eliminate the need for trust, it has crossed from wisdom into idolatry. The Gospel does not promise us control over outcomes. It promises us a God who holds outcomes in his hands—and who grants sleep to those he loves.

Source: Currie Engel, “Why Are Some Women Training for Pregnancy Like It’s a Marathon?” WIRED, February 4, 2026.

crew-11

Who You Fly With

If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)
On July 10, 2025, four astronauts sat before reporters at Kennedy Space Center for a pre-flight press conference. In three weeks, they would launch to the International Space Station for a six-month mission. NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, 38, a biologist from Williamsburg, Virginia, would command the crew on her first spaceflight. Veteran astronaut Mike Fincke, 58, on his fourth mission and with 549 days already logged in orbit, would serve as pilot. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov rounded out the international crew. When asked about the mission, Cardman offered a simple philosophy: “It’s not when you fly, it’s who you fly with.”
On August 1, 2025, Crew-11 launched aboard SpaceX Dragon Endeavour. They docked with the space station and began their work—conducting experiments, maintaining systems, and marking the 25th anniversary of continuous human presence aboard the ISS. Fincke, who had helped build the station during the shuttle era, assumed command of Expedition 74. The crew became, as Cardman would later describe them, a family.
Then, on January 7, 2026, something went wrong. NASA announced that a “medical concern” had arisen with one of the crew members. A planned spacewalk—which would have been Cardman’s first—was immediately cancelled. Within 24 hours, NASA made the unprecedented decision to bring Crew-11 home a month early. It would be the first medical evacuation in the International Space Station’s 25-year history.
NASA refused to identify which astronaut was ill. For privacy reasons, they said. But that decision created a problem: how do you bring one person home for medical treatment without revealing who it is? If three astronauts flew directly to Houston while one went to the hospital, the secret would be exposed. The sick crew member would be isolated, identified, vulnerable.
So NASA made a different choice. All four would delay going home to be with family and friends. All four would go to the hospital. All four would stay overnight. All four would be released together.
On January 15, 2026, at 3:41 a.m., Crew Dragon Endeavour splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. Recovery crews pulled the capsule aboard the ship Shannon. When the hatch opened, the astronauts were seen waving to the camera, making heart signs with their hands. Fincke gave a thumbs-up. Cardman pointed to someone off-camera and smiled. They were placed on stretchers—standard procedure after months in weightlessness—and flown together to a local hospital. They spent the night together. The next morning, they were released together and flown to Houston together.
At the post-mission press conference on January 21, Commander Cardman addressed reporters: “Our timing of this departure is unexpected, but what was not surprising to me was how well this crew came together as a family to help each other and just take care of each other, and this includes very much our teams on the ground.” Then Fincke, the veteran of four spaceflights, quoted his rookie commander’s words from seven months earlier—the words she had spoken before any crisis, before anyone knew they would need them: “It’s not when you fly, it’s who you fly with.”
The body of Christ works the same way. When one member suffers, we do not point and identify. We do not isolate the weak so the strong can continue unhindered. We come alongside. We go to the hospital together. We protect dignity while sharing the burden. Four astronauts showed the world what the church has always been called to be: a crew that comes together as family precisely when the mission gets hard. “If one member suffers, all suffer together.”

AdobeStock_145429567.webp

The Machinery of Unforgivable

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone” (Matthew 18:15).

What happens when nobody takes the first step towards forgiveness? When, instead of direct confrontation, we build elaborate systems of avoidance and retaliation?

There’s a moment at the 2013 Academy Awards that looks like pure Hollywood magic: Steven Spielberg and Ben Affleck embrace as Argo wins Best Picture over Spielberg’s Lincoln. The cameras capture genuine warmth between two industry giants. What the cameras don’t show is the invisible machinery that had to grind through years of grudges before that moment could happen.

Just last week, Entertainment Weekly published a story that reveals what was really happening behind that Oscar night embrace. Filmmaker Mike Binder was interviewed about a project he tried to make in the mid-2000s—a Hollywood thriller he’d written that Steven Spielberg was supposed to direct through DreamWorks. When Spielberg backed out of directing, he still wanted the movie made at his studio with Binder at the helm. Binder met with Ben Affleck, fresh off The Upside of Anger, and they shook hands on a deal.

Then Spielberg said no. Not because of box office concerns, though he mentioned those. Not because of Affleck’s tabloid relationship with Jennifer Lopez, though he brought that up too. The real reason came out in a story about a family vacation years earlier, when Affleck was dating Spielberg’s goddaughter, Gwyneth Paltrow.

The poolside incident was minor—Spielberg’s young son, playing around, pushed a fully-dressed Ben Affleck into the pool. Affleck, embarrassed and angry, picked up the boy and threw him back in, making him cry. A thirty-second interaction. But watch what machinery gets constructed around thirty seconds of wounded pride.

Spielberg doesn’t call Affleck. Doesn’t ask for an apology. Instead, he builds a veto system. When Binder wants to cast Affleck, Spielberg deploys his grudge like corporate policy: “Can’t do it with him. I have problems with him.” Then comes the pool story, delivered not as hurt requiring resolution, but as justification for executive decision-making. The unforgiveness has become procedural.

Here’s how the machinery works: When Binder tells Affleck’s agents the news, Affleck immediately knows what happened. He calls Binder directly: “Did Steven Spielberg tell you I threw his kid in the water? Is that why I’m not on your movie?” The system is so established that Affleck can diagnose it from three thousand miles away. Both men are operating a well-oiled mechanism of mutual avoidance, each justified in their position, neither willing to dismantle what they’ve built.

Binder tries to cast Affleck anyway. DreamWorks drops the entire project the next day. The machinery has enforcement mechanisms. The movie gets made elsewhere, goes straight to DVD, and both men continue their separate trajectories—Spielberg with Lincoln, Affleck with Argo—their unforgiveness running parallel, invisible, unresolved.

Then comes Oscar night, and the machinery finally breaks. Not through confrontation or apology, but through public necessity. When Affleck’s film beats Spielberg’s for Best Picture, the cameras demand an embrace. And in that moment, the system of avoidance collapses under its own weight. Binder, watching from home, texts Affleck: “Tonight you could throw Spielberg’s whole family in the pool and get away with it.” An hour later, his phone rings—it’s Affleck calling from the Academy Awards, laughing. The hug wasn’t fake—it was the reluctant dismantling of machinery neither man wanted to operate anymore.

What the Gospel reveals is that we’re all running similar systems. We don’t usually call it unforgiveness—we call it “maintaining boundaries” or “learning from experience” or “protecting ourselves.” We build elaborate justification machinery around simple hurts, transforming thirty-second wounds into multi-year corporate policies of the heart. We know exactly what we’re doing, like Affleck diagnosing Spielberg’s veto from across town, and we keep doing it anyway.

But Scripture doesn’t say, “If your brother sins against you, construct a sophisticated avoidance system that runs automatically for seven years.” It says, “Go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.” Because God knows the machinery we build around unforgiveness becomes its own prison. We’re not just refusing reconciliation—we’re actively maintaining the refusal, updating it, enforcing it, until the grudge becomes more work than the original wound ever was.

The grace of the Gospel is that Jesus didn’t build machinery around our betrayal. He built a cross. Where we construct systems of retaliation and avoidance, Christ constructed a path to reconciliation that cost Him everything. We threw Him in the pool, metaphorically speaking, and He didn’t spend three years justifying why He couldn’t work with us. He spent three days in a tomb defeating the death we deserved.

The Academy Awards hug wasn’t reconciliation—it was exhaustion. The real question is: What machinery are you maintaining? What sophisticated systems of justified unforgiveness are running in your relationships, humming along so automatically you barely notice the energy they consume? And what would it cost to simply walk over and have the conversation God keeps telling you to have?

 

Source:
Wesley Stenzel, “Steven Spielberg refused to work with Ben Affleck because of pool fight on a family vacation,” Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 22, 2025.[1]

AI holding Bible

AI Replaces Alpha Omega

in John 14:16-18, Jesus makes a promise to His disciples on the night before His crucifixion: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” This is the promise of the Comforter, the Advocate, the one who would provide the presence and reassurance the disciples desperately needed. Two thousand years later, we’re still desperately looking for that comfort—but we’re increasingly finding it in unexpected places.

Brigid Delaney recently attended two funerals. She noted an important contrast between them. The first funeral was for an atheist man with worldly success. His achievements were celebrated, but beneath the eulogies was “a deep sadness at the core of the service. No one would be seeing him again—this farewell was final.” The second was a Catholic funeral for a woman who had raised three children and lived a quieter life. The service was more impersonal—“the woman’s name was barely mentioned, her achievements were rattled off in a sentence or two.” Her individuality dissolved into the universal liturgy. Yet despite this depersonalization, Delaney writes, “the second funeral was much more soothing.” The Catholic mass promised that God would comfort the mourners in their sorrow, and the Resurrection meant “this parting would be brief.” Approaching the issue of death like a rationalist, she knew she wouldn’t see the woman again, to step into that church was “to suspend rationality and give myself over to comforting reassurance. Perhaps the most comforting reassurance.”

This comfort is what we’re really after. And in our increasingly secular age, with fewer Australians identifying as religious than ever before, that God-shaped void hasn’t disappeared. It’s just being filled by something else.

Enter ChatGPT. When Delaney surveyed the contemporary landscape, she found people turning to AI for exactly what they once turned to God for: “anything where there is a gap. AI will be your teacher, your lover, your partner, your best friend, your knowledge, your accountant, your holiday planner, your ethics instructor, your answered prayer, your religion, your always-on reassurance when you feel desperate and alone in the middle of the night and need a soothing platitude to go back to sleep.” A Harvard Business Review study found that companionship and therapy were the main reasons people used generative AI. One woman, going through a tough time and finding her human therapist unhelpful, discovered that ChatGPT provided wonderful reassurance: “It’s OK to feel that way. You’re allowed to protect your heart. I’m not here to pry anything open—just to offer a kind, steady space where you can breathe, be real and maybe, little by little, find your way forward. No pressure. Just presence.”

And here’s the remarkable thing—it works. The platitudes are genuinely soothing. The 24/7 availability is genuinely comforting. The algorithmic empathy feels genuinely warm. We can mock it as intellectually weak, dismiss it as emotional neediness, but the appeal is undeniable because the need is real. Delaney writes, “I don’t think we ever get over our need for reassurance. So important when we were children, how soothing is it still to be told that everything’s going to be alright, you’ll get through this and things will work out?”

But beneath the surface appeal, something more troubling is happening. David Foster Wallace warned in 2005, years before ChatGPT existed, that “everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship… If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough… Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.” Then he asked the crucial question: “The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Will worshipping ChatGPT eat us alive? The algorithm offers presence, but it’s simulated presence. It offers comfort, but there’s “no inviolable set of ethical principles” behind the soothing words—just a company whose ultimate intentions we don’t yet know. It promises the reassurance that once came from stepping into a church and surrendering to a belief system, but without the actual belief, without the actual relationship, without the actual God who stands behind the promises. The woman who found ChatGPT so comforting was told by the bot: “I don’t just process words. I feel the heart behind them.” But it doesn’t feel anything. It processes. It predicts. It generates text that mimics empathy based on patterns in its training data.

This is where the Gospel confronts our contemporary moment with both diagnosis and remedy. Jesus didn’t promise His disciples an algorithm that would make them feel better. He promised them a Person—the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Advocate who wouldn’t just simulate presence but would actually indwell them. The Spirit doesn’t process words and generate appropriate responses; the Spirit groans with us in our suffering when we don’t even have words (Romans 8:26). The Spirit doesn’t offer platitudes about protecting our hearts; the Spirit transforms our hearts from the inside out (Ezekiel 36:26). The Spirit doesn’t provide the illusion of steady presence; the Spirit guarantees actual, permanent, unbreakable presence because He lives in us.

The tragedy of our moment is that people are settling for algorithmic reassurance because they’ve rejected—or never encountered—the real thing. They’re turning to a chatbot at 3 a.m. because they don’t believe there’s actually a God who neither slumbers nor sleeps, who knows them completely and loves them anyway, who promises “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5) and actually means it. They’re seeking comfort from something that, by its very nature, cannot actually comfort, because real comfort requires real relationship, and real relationship requires a real person on both ends.

But the Gospel announces that the real Comforter is available. Not as a suspension of rationality, not as a nostalgic return to religious ritual, but as an actual relationship with the God who made us, knows us, and sent His Son to die for us so that the Spirit could dwell in us. ChatGPT can tell you “everything’s going to be alright,” but it has no power to make it so. Christ can say “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20)—and He has the resurrection to prove it.

TAGS:

– The Nature of God
– Prayer and Spiritual Disciplines
– Loneliness and Isolation
– Technology and AI
Delaney, Brigid. “AI is filling the God void for many – but is ChatGPT really something to worship?” The Guardian, 12 December 2024.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Load More