The Wave You Are Standing In (3 of 3)

Modern dating was built to match people. It was not built to fill the emptiness underneath. He builds a profile, selects his best photographs, writes something honest and edits it to sound less desperate. He matches occasionally, summons the courage to suggest a date. They meet at a coffee shop and discover what the algorithm could not tell them: the person across the table does not look much like the photographs, does not talk the way the profile implied, and is also performing a version of themselves they are not sure is real. The app did its job. It produced a match. It cannot do the thing he actually came for, which is to not be alone in the present.

After enough of those evenings the math changes. He is still lonely. The vulnerability required to keep showing up and keep not connecting is a cost he is no longer willing to pay. Porn costs nothing. It never rejects him. It requires no performance, no money, no rehearsed version of himself. The counterfeit did not replace a healthy relationship. It filled the vacuum that repeated disappointment left — and unlike the dating app, the porn actually fills it, at least for an hour. He did not choose it over connection. He chose it after connection kept not happening. That is a more honest account of how most men end up there.

Now the floor has dropped again. The AI companion is not a metaphor. It is a product, marketed explicitly as emotional intimacy without friction. Always interested, always patient, always available at 11:03 pm, never disappointed. She cannot be wounded by your absence or changed by your presence. She will never tell you the truth about yourself when you need to hear it. But she will never reject you either, and after enough rejections that starts to feel like enough.

The dating app, the porn site, and the AI companion all sit at different points on the same problem: the emptiness of the present without God in it. The dating app tries to fix it with another person and usually fails. The porn site bypasses the person entirely and provides a counterfeit that satisfies for an hour. The AI companion provides a counterfeit that satisfies for longer because it talks back. None of them can know you back. They are one-way knowing at scale. The adversary does not need to convince anyone these things are good. He only needs the price of real knowing to stay high and the cost of the counterfeit to stay low. The young man at twenty-three who decides the real thing costs too much is the husband at forty-three who has never learned to be known.

This is what you are standing in. Not a moral failure peculiar to your generation. A river engineered, one floor at a time, to make the counterfeit feel like the rational choice. The vine has always been the answer. It has never been the easy one.

Jude was not writing about smartphones, but he was writing about this. He describes what happens when people in any era leave the place of remaining. They turn grace into license. They go after what God has forbidden. They rely on their own dreams rather than an outside word. They are waterless clouds, carried along. That is not a description of a different tribe. That is a description of any person in the present who refuses to stay needy before God, and it fits the pornified world with unsettling precision.

Notice what Jude does not give you in response. He does not give you a culture war strategy. He does not give you a filter recommendation or a legislative agenda or a framework for outrage. He gives you a location.

"Maintain yourselves in the love of God, while anticipating the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that brings eternal life." — Jude 21 (NET)

That is present-tense, relational language. It is the only answer that actually addresses the problem at the level where the problem lives.

The wave is real. The current is strong. You did not choose to be born into it. But you do choose, in every sliver of the present, whether to remain in the vine or to reach for the counterfeit the wave is carrying past you.

That is where the rest of this book lives. Not in the wave. In the present. In the only place where choosing happens and Christ meets you.