I spent a few weeks in Cambodia and Thailand on a short-term mission trip. During that time I walked a village in Cambodia inviting the people to a BBQ lunch. We wanted to feed them and bless them the best we could.
Most of the people we found were sitting in the dirt or lying on raised wooden platforms, weaving boxes out of palm leaves in 113-degree heat. Those platforms aren’t porches or patios. They’re their homes. The whole home. And on those platforms they sell those boxes for 13 cents. I watched their hands work while we talked. Fold, tuck, fold. Thirteen cents.
I write about AI for a living. Bible Morning exists to help believers use this technology with discernment, and I believe in that work. But standing on that path, sweating through my shirt, watching a family weave boxes, I’ll tell you what nobody in that village asked me about. AI. Not once. Most of them never finished 6th grade. The questions that fill my inbox, the debates that fill my feed, the things I lose sleep over. None of it exists there. And I had to stand in that heat to see how much weight I’d been giving it.
One afternoon I met a widow. She’s sixteen. Her daughter is three. Her husband died in the fighting between Thailand and Cambodia. She told us this the way you’d tell someone the time of day, because in her village it isn’t a shocking story. It’s a Tuesday. I stood there with my lunch invitation and my American worries and I had nothing. So we did what we came to do. We ate together. We sang. We laughed with the kids. We told them about Jesus, and we loved them with food and presence and time.
The Bible has a word for that.
“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” — James 1:27 (NKJV)
James doesn’t say pure religion is having the right positions. He doesn’t say it’s winning the debate or publishing the article. He says go to the orphan and the widow in their trouble. I met them both in one person, sixteen years old, holding a three-year-old on her hip. The verse stopped being a verse. She had a face.
Here’s what I want to be careful to say, because it would be easy to get this wrong. I didn’t come home thinking Bible Morning was a mistake. I know my calling. God built this ministry through my own story, and the believers I serve are facing real questions about a technology that’s already in their kids’ homework and their pastor’s sermon prep. That work matters and I’m not putting it down.
But God used a dirt path in Cambodia to remind me what His work is actually about. It’s people. It has always been people. Not systems. Not platforms. Not the technology I spend my days writing about. When Jesus gave the Great Commission, He said go and make disciples of all the nations, and the nations turn out to be a girl weaving boxes for 13 cents who needs to hear that God sees her.
So as I sit here back at my desk, the work in front of me looks the same and reads completely different. Bible Morning was never about AI. It’s about the person using it. The mom wondering if the chatbot is safe for her kids. The pastor afraid he’s falling behind. The new believer who asked an AI a question about God and got an answer that sounded right and wasn’t. Those are my villagers. That’s who I walk toward.
Thank You, Lord, for letting me go. For the team, the songs, the shared meals, the laughter that needed no translation. And for the reminder I didn’t know I needed.
If you serve in any ministry that touches technology, money, buildings, programs, any of it, ask yourself the question Cambodia asked me: when did you last look past the thing you manage to the person it’s for? Find their face this week. The work is the people. It was never anything else.
