Pain

A viral screenshot recently sparked debate after someone received a text message offering support during a divorce. The message, “I’m so sorry to hear you’re going through such a tough time. It’s very normal to feel what you’re feeling for a while. Love is a hard come down,” struck the recipient as oddly impersonal and “canned.” Suspicion grew when a friend pointed out the straight apostrophes-a hallmark of AI-generated text, such as those produced by ChatGPT.

Since ChatGPT’s 2022 launch, people have increasingly turned to AI for help with emotionally difficult messages-breakups, condolences, even wedding vows. Public reaction is often negative, with critics lamenting the loss of genuine human connection and the rise of awkward, robotic phrasing. The phrase “Love is a hard come down” became emblematic of this disconnect: a human in pain seeking comfort, and receiving what felt like a digital ghostwriter’s response instead.

Why do people turn to AI? Because expressing support during someone’s crisis is notoriously hard. Many struggle to find the right words, sometimes choosing silence (ghosting) over risking an awkward reply. In this context, using ChatGPT at least ensures a response is sent-even if it lacks warmth.

This dilemma is not new. For centuries, people have grappled with what to say in the face of grief or hardship. Google searches like “What to say to someone…with cancer…who is dying” reveal an endless need for guidance. Sitting shiva (sitting with someone in mourning) is not something you can really do in the metaverse. Are you supposed to mute yourself during a Zoom funeral?

Ultimately, the most important rule remains unchanged: Show up. Bring some bagels.

A Florida mother has sued artificial intelligence chatbot startup Character.AI accusing it of causing her 14-year-old son's suicide in February of 2024. She said he became addicted to the company's service and deeply attached to a chatbot it created.

Megan Garcia is on a mission to raise awareness about the dangers of AI. Garcia maintains that the site’s protocols to protect children are woefully inadequate, and wants to spare other parents from the pain she’s had to endure.

In an interview, Garcia said, “I want them to understand that this is a platform that the designers chose to put out without proper guardrails, safety measures or testing, and it is a product that is designed to keep our kids addicted and to manipulate them.”

Garcia maintains that her son, Sewell Setzer III, had been chatting with an AI chatbot on the platform for months, and that as a result, he’d become more withdrawn and sullen. Sewell eventually quit the JV basketball team during this time.

It was only after confiscating his phone as punishment for misbehavior that Garcia discovered that many of the chatbot’s conversations with her son were sexually explicit. “I don’t think any parent would approve of that,” said Garcia, adding that the discovery was “gut wrenching.”

In the lawsuit, Garcia says that her son had been specifically chatting with it in the moments before he died. In the exchange, Sewell had mentioned considering self-harm, and the chatbot seemed to encourage that desire. Sewell then shot himself with his stepfather's pistol "seconds" later, the lawsuit said.

Garcia said, “There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that. I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”

After the lawsuit was announced, Character.AI announced a sweeping set of changes designed to protect its younger users, a move that Garcia derided as “too little, too late.”

Suffering and struggles can open the door to discovering true meaning in life. This is what Celine Dion learned after her diagnosis with Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS).

When Dion first discovered her diagnosis, it was a devastating blow. The rare condition, characterized by severe muscle spasms and rigidity, began to take over her life, causing both physical pain and emotional distress. Most significantly, the disease affected her vocal cords. Dion, who is passionate about performing, was forced to cancel performances and take a step back from the public eye, which added to her sense of isolation.

Despite the physical and emotional toll of the illness, she found new purpose in her journey. Dion shared:

No one should suffer alone. A lot of people are going through things alone for many, many, many years. If I would have just stayed secretly behind, my home would have become a prison, and I would have become a prisoner of my own life. Today I live one day at a time. The fact that I found the strength to communicate my condition with the world makes me very proud. Maybe my purpose in this life is to help others, and that is the greatest gift.

How do you make sense of the problem of pain and the wonder of beauty occurring in the same world? If you’ve ever had the privilege of visiting the Louvre in Paris, you probably braved the crowds to get a glimpse of the statue of Venus de Milo.

Millions have been captivated by the woman’s physical beauty displayed in stunningly smooth marble. They’ve also been disturbed by seeing her arms broken off. Somehow the damage done to her arms doesn’t destroy the aesthetic pleasure of viewing the sculpture as a whole. But it does cause a conflicted experience—such beauty, marred by such violence.

I doubt if anyone has ever stood in front of that masterpiece and asked, “Why did the sculptor break off the arms?” More likely, everyone concludes the beautiful parts are the work of a master artist and the broken parts are the results of someone or something else—either a destructive criminal or a natural catastrophe.

We need a unified perspective on created beauty and marred ugliness that can make sense of both. The Christian faith provides that. It points to a good God who made a beautiful world with pleasures for people to enjoy. But it also recognizes damage caused by sinful people. Ultimately, it points to a process of restoration that has already begun and will continue forever.

Rabbi Sharon Brous writes about an ancient Jewish practice from Second Temple Judaism:

Several times each year, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious and political life. They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount and enter its enormous plaza, turning to the right en masse, circling counterclockwise.

Meanwhile, the brokenhearted, the mourners (and here I would also include the lonely and the sick), would make this same ritual walk but they would turn to the left and circle in the opposite direction: every step against the current.

And each person who encountered someone in pain would look into that person’s eyes and inquire: “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?”

“Because I am a mourner,” a person might say. “My father died,” another person might say. “There are so many things I never got to say to him.” Or perhaps: “My partner left. I was completely blindsided.”

Those who walked from the right would offer a blessing: “May the Holy One comfort you,” they would say. “You are not alone.” And then they would continue to walk until the next person approached.

This timeless wisdom speaks to what it means to be human in a world of pain. This year, you walk the path of the anguished. Perhaps next year, it will be me. I hold your broken heart knowing that one day you will hold mine.

Editor’s Note: You can read the original from Mishnah Middot 2.2 here.

After so many years of fame, the actress Angelina Jolie has resigned herself to some elements of its bargain. The constant gaze of paparazzi means other people have chosen how they want to see her.

Jolie says, “Since I was young, people liked the part of me that’s pretty tough and maybe a bit wild—that’s the part that I think people enjoy. I’m not the one [who] you want to hear about my pain or my sadness. You know, that’s not entertaining.”

Jolie plans to eventually leave L.A. “I grew up in quite a shallow place,” she says. “Of all the places in the world, Hollywood is not a healthy place. So, you seek authenticity.”

"I feel like a monster," Gabriel Marshall said to his dad. Eight-year-old Gabriel had recently undergone surgery to remove a tumor from his brain, and he now bore a conspicuous scar on the side of his head. His dad, Josh, had an idea: he got a tattoo on the side of his head that was in the exact shape of Gabriel's scar. He told Gabriel, "If people want to stare at you, then they can stare at both of us."

A picture of the two sporting their scars eventually won first place in a Father's Day photo competition run by St. Baldrick's Foundation, "an organization dedicated to fighting childhood cancer."

Possible Preaching Angle:

In some ways, their story might remind us of another story: about an empathetic Father, a wounded Son, and scars that were chosen because of love.

A mere generation ago, “heartbreak” was an overused literary metaphor but not an actual medical event. The first person to recognize it as a genuine condition was a Japanese cardiologist named Hikaru Sato.

In 1990, Dr. Sato identified the curious case of a female patient who displayed the symptoms of a heart attack while testing negative for it. He named it “Takotsubo Syndrome” after noticing that the left ventricle of her heart changed shape during the episode to resemble a takotsubo, a traditional octopus-trap.

A Japanese study in 2001 not only confirmed Sato’s identification of a sudden cardio event that mimics a heart attack but also highlighted the common factor of emotional distress in such patients. It had taken the medical profession 4,000 years to acknowledge what poets had been saying all along: Broken Heart Syndrome is real.

Nowadays, there are protocols for treating the coronary problem diagnosed by Dr. Sato. But although we can cure Broken Heart Syndrome, we still can’t cure a broken heart.

Actor Matthew Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing on the hit TV show Friends, recently died at the age of 54. Perry was cast in Friends, the sitcom that shot him to fame, at age 24. He starred as Chandler for the sitcom's entire 10-season run, a sarcastic yet affable fellow.

According to an obituary on NPR,

[B]ehind the scenes, Perry struggled with addiction. He opened up about his decades-long excessive use of alcohol and pills in his memoir published in 2022, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. In the book, which he dedicated to fellow sufferers of addiction, he detailed his painful struggle with drug use and his related health problems: He said he'd spent half of his life in treatment, detoxed an estimated 65 times and underwent 14 surgeries.

Perry estimated that he had spent more than $7 million over 15 rehab stays treating his addictions to drugs and alcohol. While on set, Perry tried to hide his addiction problem, which he said went hand-in-hand with the pressure to get laughs. Perry wrote in his memoir:

I felt like I was gonna die if the live audience didn't laugh, and that's not healthy for sure. But I could sometimes say a line and the audience wouldn't laugh and I would sweat and sometimes go into convulsions. If I didn't get the laugh I was supposed to get I would freak out. I felt that every single night. This pressure left me in a bad place. I also knew of the six people making that show, only one of them was sick.

His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic. In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.

During an interview in late 2012 he said, “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear. In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.

When asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Dr. Narita graphically described to a group of assembled students a scene from “Midsommar.” This is a 2019 horror film in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. Dr. Narita said, “Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer. So, if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”

At other times, he has broached the topic of euthanasia. He said in one interview, “The possibility of making it mandatory in the future … will come up in discussion.” Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context,” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics—to make room for younger generations. Nevertheless, with his comments on euthanasia and social security, which appear clear enough, he has pushed the hottest button in Japan.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is not a pleasant or positive illustration, but it does highlight the dangers of losing the biblical doctrine of the Imago Dei and the sanctity of every human life.

Conservatives are not alone in opposing the slippery slope that is the growing trend toward advocating for euthanasia. The liberal periodical The Nation, as well as liberal disability advocates, are raising the alarm as well. The reality is that the lives of Americans with disabilities are being devalued:

Disability is something people are taught to hate and fear. And people with disabilities are frequently not given the resources they need to live or the assistance they need to participate fully in society. The poverty rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people. Further, the unemployment rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people. The responsibility for care that is shirked by the state frequently falls on families, who are overwhelmed. Instead of being given the resources they need to thrive, many, if not most, people with disabilities are treated like expensive burdens.

Diane Coleman, the president of Not Dead Yet, has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair and a respirator. She says, “It is not the disabilities that ruin lives. It is the system and society that fails to support disabled people. It’s not religious, nor is it pro-life. It’s about going up against a ‘better dead than disabled mindset.’”

Coleman says medical professionals have devalued her life and others with disabilities. One member of her staff was told by his father that it would have been better if he’d died in the accident that made him a quadriplegic. Coleman said, “Those experiences are so well-known in the community.”

23-year-old Jules Good, assistant director of Not Dead Yet, said of her experience, shared by many others: “When I was 18, I got a pretty rough diagnosis. I was super depressed and attempted suicide. And when I went to my first counseling appointment with a new therapist, I explained my whole deal. And she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Yeah, I’d probably kill myself if I were you.’”

Actor Jeremy Renner said he would risk getting run over by a snowplow again to save his nephew. Renner said, “I’d do it again, because it was going right at my nephew.”

The accident happened near Renner’s Nevada home. Heavy snow had fallen, and his vehicle, driven by a family member, got stuck. Renner went to get into his snowplow, which weighs at least 14,000 pounds, to help move the vehicle. As he was speaking with the family member, the snowplow began to roll. He attempted to get back inside, but was run over. The 52-year-old actor broke over 30 bones and required numerous surgeries.

Renner said he thought he might die. He told Diane Sawyer, “I’m thinkin’ like, ‘What’s my body look like? Am I just gonna be like a spine in a brain, like a science experiment?’” Renner’s neighbor who made the 911 call said, “It was blood, the amount of blood, and then he was—he was just in such pain. Then when I looked at his head, it appeared to me to be cracked wide open.”

Renner had broken bones spanning the entire length of his body—including both his ankles, some of his ribs, his right shoulder, eye socket, and jaw. He also suffered a collapsed lung. At one point in the televised interview, Renner started crying and said, “What we just endured. That’s real love. It’s suffering. But that feeds the seeds of what love is.”

In a New York Times editorial, David French notes the frequent conversations he has with parents of teenagers about the teen mental health crisis in America. French writes, “As a parent of a teenager, I see this world every day.” But then he raises the following questions about this crisis: “What if the call [to anxiety and depression and rage] is also coming from inside the house? What if parents are inadvertently contributing to their own kids’ pain?”

French writes:

When we think about children and screens, let’s also consider the relationship between adults and their TVs and smartphones. Watch [the news] and you’ll see a discourse dominated by fear and anger. If you spend any time at all on political Twitter [or Facebook], you’ll quickly see a level of vicious, personal attacks that differ little from the most extreme personal bullying a person can experience in middle school or high school.

What should we do about it? French concludes:

It might be worth asking a simple question: How much fear and anxiety should we import into our lives and homes? Forget teens, for the moment. Are we proving any more capable of handling the information age? It’s a question I honestly ask myself … I know that my anxiety can radiate outward to affect my kids …. If we want to heal our children [we] may well start by seeking the help we need to heal ourselves.

Many of the world’s greatest souls became their best selves not in spite of but because of their distress. The great hymn writer Cowper wrote hopeful hymns and the great artist Van Gogh brushed epic paintings while contemplating suicide. Charles Spurgeon preached some of his best sermons while depressed. Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr. battled melancholy. The great composer Beethoven went deaf. C.S. Lewis buried his wife after a short, cancer-ridden marriage. Elie Wiesel and Corrie Ten Boom survived the holocaust. Joni Eareckson Tada lost her ability to walk in a tragic accident. John Perkins endured jail, beatings, and death threats from white supremacists.

As grief expert Elizabeth Kubler Ross famously noted, “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known one defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation and sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep love and concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Kim Kuo tells of the 10-year-long battle her late husband, David, had with terminal cancer. David was the former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Much of his time was spent in pain from the vicious side effects of surgeries, radiation, and medications. But, instead of considering the alternative of euthanasia or becoming passive, he chose to focus his remaining time to spiritually touch the lives of people.

Especially in suffering, we can dive below the shallow waters and touch another’s heart and soul. Steve Jobs, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, shared this wisdom at a commencement speech at Stanford University: ‘No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.’