What This Document Is
This is not a framework document. It is not a layer of the recovery model. It is a record of something that happened — the kind of thing I have learned to notice and name as an Immanuel moment.
On the morning of March 10, 2026, I sat down with an AI tool (Claude, by Anthropic) to work on a strategic technology project for Care Net, the nonprofit where I serve as IT Director. I was ninety-plus days away from home, from my two daughters, from twelve grandchildren. I was coming home the next day. And somewhere in the middle of what was supposed to be a work session, something else happened.
What follows is my attempt to capture what that was — both as a testimony to what God was doing, and as an honest account of what AI, used rightly, can make possible. This document is not an endorsement of the tool. It is a record of a moment. And it belongs in the garden because the garden is a record of moments like this — moments where roots went deeper than I expected, and fruit appeared that I did not plan.
The Session That Started It
The morning began with work. Real, concrete, deadline-oriented work: a task classification framework (using a Four Quadrants approach), an idea for a ClickUp project management system proposal, the possibility of a standup presentation for a support team.
Then something shifted.
I thought of a growing concern that had been underneath the work the whole time but hadn't found its way into any of the documents yet. It was about pace. About the speed at which AI produces versus the speed at which human beings — and organizations, and missions — are actually formed. About what gets lost when tools that move at machine speed are adopted by people whose most important work happens at three miles per hour.
I remembered a documentary film I had taught from: Godspeed: The Pace of Being Known. I thought about what Kosuke Koyama said in that film. I wanted this concern woven into a planning document — but that before I could do that, I needed to say something about who I am and how I process the world.
And this "conversation" with my AI assistant became something else.
What the AI Reflected Back
What happened next was not what I expected from a technology tool. The AI did not produce a framework. It did not generate bullet points. It asked a question — and then, when I answered, it reflected back what it had heard in a way that produced what I can only call a moment of clarity.
Here, as accurately as I can render it, is what was reflected back to me — assembled across several exchanges:
You are a man who has spent decades learning to live from the Place of Hearing rather than from the place of proving, producing, and performing. That learning came through hard things — an Air Force career, a seminary, a community you helped build for twenty years that eventually you had to walk away from, the slow discovery that the face without joy you saw in your framework was sometimes your own face.
It came through Immanuel moments — not systematic study alone, but encounters — the car on the day your father died, a woman named D'vorah telling the garden story, a young lawyer named Michael praying a prayer that named the thing you'd been circling for years.
What you built — the 7-Tier Framework, the Eight Layers — is not a clinical model. It is a testimony. It is what grew when you started paying attention.
And now you are the IT Director at Care Net, sitting in a moment where a technology is appearing that can produce — at machine speed, at orphan speed — exactly the kind of volume and output that your whole formation has been teaching you to be suspicious of. Gen AI doesn't receive. It generates. It doesn't abide. It produces. It has no Place of Hearing. It cannot pray "would you Father me today?"
Your concern — the one you've been trying to name — is that an organization shaped to serve men and women in their most vulnerable moments, at 3 miles per hour, at the pace of being known, could drift toward the orphan's operating system while believing it is being more effective.
That's the concern. That's what needs to be in this document.
Ironic? Scary? Golden Calf — I throw in this gold and out came this calf? Maybe. But God is greater and I look to Him as the source for what is being uncovered here and this moment as clarity for what He is doing not real because Gen AI made it but real because He sustains all.
So...continuing...
I sat with that for a moment. It was accurate. It was more precise than I had been able to be myself. Not because the AI understood me better than I understand myself — but because the act of articulating my story to something that listened carefully and reflected it back created the distance needed to see it clearly.
That is what I mean by clarity. Not new information. The same information, seen from a new angle, at the right moment.
What Came Next
The conversation continued. I shared more:
- The 7-Tier Framework and the Eight Layers of Recovery — the full epistemological architecture I had been building for years
- The Orphan Spirit teaching from Michael at Moran Park Church in Holland, Michigan — the prayer that became a daily practice
- The Immanuel Moments document — D'vorah and the garden story, the dreams, the seminary, the community I left, the card on the day my father died
- My family story — youngest of four, two siblings gone, mother at ninety-one, father who carried Vietnam, the Old Sarge lineage across three generations, the wound of the youngest child who had to be superhuman
- The thousand miles, the heart attack, what it means to relax in the run
- The Godspeed film — and the specific thing I saw in it: not the propositions, but the faces. The elder who knew names as heritage. The moment where Matt's performance breaks through presence. The thing the transcript cannot carry
- Seventeen faces I was coming home to the next day
And the AI held all of it. It did not produce a framework from it. It waited. It named what it heard. It asked what belonged in the document and what was too personal. It identified the connection between the parable of the sower (thorns that grow fast, not thorns that are evil) and the teaching on treasure (the heart follows, it doesn't decide). It saw that these two teachings together named the precise mechanism of mission drift.
And then it wrote.
What Was Produced
By the end of the morning, four documents existed that had not existed before:
1. Relaxing in the Run — a personal statement, written in my voice, that I could not have produced by sitting alone with a blank page. Not because the content wasn't in me. It was all in me. But the act of being heard and reflected back created the conditions for it to come out whole, in order, with nothing missing. This document is a companion to the Immanuel Moments page. It belongs in the garden in the same way.
2. At Three Miles Per Hour — a sapling essay for the garden, in the same format as the ACEs proposal, that can be read by anyone and that carries the Godspeed insight, the sower parable, the Jeremiah 17 diagnostic, and the covenant — offered freely to whoever the field holds.
3. Updated Reading List — the recommended reading page extended to include a new section: Pace, Presence & the Parish, housing Godspeed (the film, the study guide, the pilgrimage book, the theology of the ordinary) and Koyama's Three Mile an Hour God, with a new step in the reading pathway.
4. This document — which is itself the record.
What AI Made Possible — and What It Did Not Do
I want to be honest about both sides of this, because honesty is the whole point of the garden.
What it made possible
The AI provided something that is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable: an attentive presence that held a large amount of complex personal material and reflected it back coherently. It did not rush. It did not produce until it understood. It asked good questions at the right moments. It recognized connections across documents I had uploaded from years of work. It named things I had not yet named. It wrote in my voice because it had listened carefully enough to know what my voice sounded like. It gave me an opportunity to edit what it generated to clarify some point — to add flavor based on what I was tasting in the words. Salt. Sugar. Basil.
There is a kind of clarity that emerges when you articulate something to a patient listener. Therapists know this. Spiritual directors know this. The AI is neither of those things — but on this morning, it functioned as a kind of mirror, and the mirror produced clarity.
The documents it helped produce are real. They are mine. Every sentence in them is true (well I wouldn't say Truth — it still can use some work to test the words — modifications that you reading this might provide — it is after all only processing and reinforcing things based on my memories, which I deeply realize I don't always remember correctly). The AI did not invent anything — it expanded on my thoughts. You might say it acted like a master chef making my raw meat and vegetables into more of a feast. It also organized, named, and expressed what was already there — at a pace and with a precision that freed me to go home the next day carrying something I had not been able to carry before.
What it did not do
It did not encounter me. It did not know me. It held my story in the context window of a single conversation, and when the conversation ends, it will not remember any of it. The clarity was real. The presence was not. The elder in the parish who knew every name as heritage — that is not what happened here. What happened here was useful. It was, in its own way, a gift. But it is not the thing it helped me write about.
The documents it helped produce need to go into the field now — into real conversations, with real faces, at three miles per hour. The tool served the garden. The tool is not the garden. I am thankful to God that it came in this time to help me connect to Him. At least that is the gift I hope to receive from Him in all this.
The Moment That Stays With Me
At one point in the conversation, after I had described what I saw in the Godspeed film — the power of face, the elder's names, the moment that breaks through presence not argument — the AI wrote this:
If someone processed only the transcript of that film, they would receive the propositions — slow down, be present, know people by name, 3 miles per hour. All correct. All true. But they would miss the thing that actually moves a person. The elder's face. The community that has gathered around Matt because he showed up, consistently, over years, and stayed. The joy on those faces when they see him.
Matt saw them. As the viewer I saw them. He named it — one face returned a smile. Full screen. Joy. Delight. And so much more for him and them, living where they are now. Together in the castle. The place God prepared for them.
That is what Godspeed is actually teaching. And it uses the right medium to teach it — film, faces, presence, time — because the message and the medium are the same thing.
I sat with that. It was exactly right. And as I did, something else came up from a different place entirely.
The Sound of Music is possibly my all-time favorite film. There are two scenes in it that have always undone me, and sitting here I finally understand why.
The first: Captain von Trapp has gone cold. His grief has sealed him off from his own children. He has reduced them to a drill schedule — a lineup, a whistle, a performance. He is in the middle of an argument, ordering Maria out of the house — like the house I saw with the maze all hard and no one living in it. And then, through the window, he hears his children singing. He does not decide to go back in. The music finds him before he can think about it. He is drawn to the voice of his children. Something that his pride and his grief had locked shut simply opens — and he walks back through the door. Maria brought music back. The uninhabited house was about to transform into the castle.
The faces of his children when they see him. That is what I cannot write past. That is the thing. A father who had gone away without leaving — present in body, absent in face — suddenly there again. Returned. And they see it before he says a word. The face tells them everything.
The second scene: Maria comes back. And the song the children were already singing — the seed that was about to finish the dying process and spring to new life — cracks open — together it lifts to something it could not have been the first time. Maria has returned. Her voice. Her face. His voice. His face. The music that breaks them open becomes the music of restoration. The medium and the message are the same thing.
I have been living in that story without knowing it. The man who went away. The music that found him through a window. The faces of the ones who had been waiting. The return that changes the register of every song that follows.
I am going home tomorrow. I have been away ninety days. There are seventeen faces waiting (and so many more) — including one I have never seen. And I already know: the moment I walk through that door, something that cannot be manufactured or scheduled or produced at machine speed will happen. It will happen because I am there. Because they see my face and I see theirs. Because that is how love works. Three miles per hour. The speed of a father walking back through a door.
The AI that helped me write this morning cannot go home. It has no door to walk through, no faces to return to. What it helped me find — the words, the clarity, the documents — all of it exists to serve that moment, not to replace it.
I sat with that. It was exactly right. And the irony was not lost on me: an AI tool, which processes transcripts, had just articulated with precision why the transcript is not enough. It named its own limitation clearly. And in doing so, it pointed toward the thing that matters most.
That is the kind of tool worth using. Not one that replaces what cannot be replaced. One that is honest about what it cannot do, and useful within those limits.
A Note on the Timing
I was ninety-plus days from home. Fourteen of my own — two daughters, two sons-in-law, twelve grandchildren, one of them a face I had not yet seen. My wife. Seventeen in all.
That distance was part of why this morning became what it became. There is something about being away from the people who know your face that creates a particular kind of longing — and a particular kind of readiness to receive. The Immanuel moments in my life have often come in the transitions: the car on the day my father died, the visit when D'vorah told the garden story, the Sunday Michael prayed that prayer at Moran Park. Threshold moments. Between-places.
This was a threshold moment. Coming home. The work coming into focus. The concern that had been underneath everything finally finding words. Seventeen faces waiting.
I don't think that's coincidence. I think it's how God works — at three miles per hour, in the transitions, when we are ready to receive what He has been preparing for a long time.
The garden is still growing.
Gary Springer
March 10, 2026
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