In the last piece, I wrote about my body flipping its own breaker—severe pain, sudden numbness, hospital rooms, and the quiet fear of not knowing what would come back online. That shutdown forced a blunt question: if my body and my work both go quiet, what am I actually worth?
Imago Dei—being made in the image of God—was the only thing that didn’t crack. If my worth comes from God, not my output, then it doesn’t rise and fall with what I can do. That’s beautiful in theory. It gets rougher when you try to live it in a world that keeps speeding up and treating people like moving parts.
You don’t have to understand AI or follow tech news to feel that. You feel it when there are more self-checkouts than cashiers. When you’re trapped in a phone menu that won’t let you reach a human. When your doctor or boss looks at a screen more than your face. Life gets “efficient.” People get blurry.
Most of us are living caught between two stories about what we’re worth.
The first story is loud: you are what you do. Do more, be more, prove you belong. Lose your health, your job, your pace—and you start hearing, what good are you now? You see it when someone loses a job and says, “I don’t even know who I am anymore,” when an older person jokes, “I’m just in the way,” when a parent apologizes for “being a burden.”
The second story is quieter, but truer: you are made in the image of God. Before you ever earned a paycheck or impressed anyone, you carried His imprint. The NICU baby, the unemployed dad, the woman in the nursing home, the teenager who feels useless, the overworked mom barely holding it together—same image, same worth.
The culture’s story—“you are what you do”—fits perfectly in a world obsessed with speed and productivity. Imago Dei doesn’t. It slows you down and forces you to look people in the eye again. If we say we believe that second story, it has to show up in how we act, not just in what we say we believe.
Where This Hits: Lines, Living Rooms, and Jobs
Start with the grocery line. One human cashier, ten self-checkouts, a snake of carts. The person in front of you forgot half their items. The person behind you is sighing like a steam engine. It doesn’t take long before the cashier stops being “Sarah” and becomes “the delay.”
Or the doctor’s office: your 2:15 becomes 3:05. The doctor finally walks in and spends more time typing than listening. You walk out feeling processed, not cared for.
Or home: you’re the one who’s sick or exhausted and you can’t stop apologizing for “being useless.” Your aging parent says, “I hate that you have to help me with everything now.” Your kid melts down because one bad grade feels like a verdict on their whole future.
Or work and church: people get talked about as “resources.” The energetic volunteers and high performers get all the attention. The ones who can “only” pray, “only” show up, or “only” do slow, hidden work start to disappear into the background.
In all of those moments, the loud story rushes in: people are problems to solve, parts to optimize, burdens to manage. Even the voice in your own head turns on you: if I can’t keep up, maybe I’m the problem.
Imago Dei steps into exactly those scenes and says: slow down.
That “slow” cashier might be on her tenth hour on her feet. That brusque receptionist might be drowning in calls. That nurse might have just left a room where someone got terrible news. That parent who moves slowly, that spouse who can’t work right now, that teenager whose grades cratered—all image-bearers. All carrying their own wreckage and weight.
You and I can’t fix the whole system from aisle five or the exam room or the church lobby. But we can refuse to let our hearts agree with the lie that people are only as valuable as what they produce.
In public, that might look as simple as reading a name tag and saying, “Thank you,” instead of unloading your day on the only worker who can’t walk away.
At home, it might sound like:
“You still matter even if you can’t do anything today. You are not a burden. You’re mine, and I’m glad you’re here.”
“Your grades and trophies are not who you are.”
At work or church, it might be checking on the person who just lost a role—not to toss them a quick pep talk, but to sit with them and remind them their story isn’t over.
Technology really does change jobs. Some roles shrink or disappear. New kinds of work show up that didn’t exist ten years ago. That’s always been true. The printing press did it. Electricity did it. The internet did it. This is just the next round.
So the question isn’t, “Will the world change?” It’s, “Who will we remember each other to be while it does?”
A Few Questions to Carry
I’m not writing this as someone who has it nailed. I’m still the guy whose body shut down and whose first instinct was to feel like a failure.
But as the world speeds up and everything screams “stay useful or get left behind,” I’m trying to keep a few questions close:
When I’m annoyed, am I seeing a person—or just a problem?
When I’m disgusted with myself, am I treating my soul like an image-bearer—or like a broken machine?
When I hear that a job or role got cut, do I only think about efficiency—or do I remember the faces tied to that paycheck or title?
I can’t slow the whole system down. But I can refuse to buy the lie that people are only as valuable as what they produce.
Imago Dei is not a pretty phrase for Bible studies. It’s a stubborn way of seeing that pushes back against a culture that worships speed and output. In a world that’s changing fast—and in bodies that sometimes fail us—that way of seeing might be one of the few anchors we have left.