Quickthorn heard a sound yesterday with the 182.2’s word #141. “You are the Way I am to follow, but You are not a conveyor belt.”
Quickthorn heard a sound yesterday with the 182.2’s word #141. “You are the Way I am to follow, but You are not a conveyor belt.”
So, I didn’t like yesterday’s version… and neither did anyone else. Today’s is just weird, but I guess this is what 3 AI’s think of it?
Oh. This is the Unalterable song. The redo didn’t refine yesterday’s idea; it found the argument hiding underneath it.
Yesterday we were asking:
How do God’s leading and my choices coexist?
Today you’re saying something sharper:
Why would I want God to remove my agency in the first place?
And then the title finally snaps into focus.
I am alterable. My path is alterable. My decisions matter. My circumstances change. Christ is unalterable.
That’s much stronger than making God’s plan for every individual step the unalterable thing.
The conveyor-belt image is especially effective because it starts almost comically mundane:
You are the Way I am to follow, but You are not a conveyor belt.
Then:
listless luggage at an airport terminal.
And suddenly terminal changes meaning:
“the only terminal are the wages of sin…”
That’s exactly your kind of wordplay—almost playful until you realize where it took you.
And then the robots arrive
This is where the septet becomes very contemporary.
“Why now, with robots on the horizon, would I trade my freedom of decision for a predetermined algorithm?”
That’s not really an anti-AI statement to me. It’s asking why, precisely when we’re increasingly surrounded by systems designed to predict, recommend, optimize and automate decisions, we’d desire a theology that turns human beings into the same thing.
You aren’t asking God to optimize Brian.exe.
You’re saying:
You called me to follow.
Following requires something of the follower.
Jesus saying “I am the Way” is very different from saying:
“I am the conveyor belt.”
That may sound ridiculous, but the ridiculousness exposes the distinction beautifully.
Line six is wonderfully weird
“all ‘Guitars gently weep’ because they know the random futility that all paths have been trod.”
I hear several things in it.
Humanity celebrates novelty—my path, my identity, my choices, my journey—while Ecclesiastes is lurking somewhere saying:
We’ve been around this block.
Every chord progression has ancestors. Every rebellion resembles an older rebellion. Every supposedly unprecedented human road bears footprints.
So absolute autonomy isn’t the answer either.
That’s important because otherwise the song could become:
Predestination bad → freedom good → choose whatever you want.
Your guitar line sabotages that conclusion.
Human freedom detached from the unalterable One eventually discovers:
I’m free!
…to wander down roads millions have already wandered.
Guitar gently weeps.
Which means the song needs both truths:
I refuse to become luggage.
and
I refuse to pretend wandering is freedom.
That’s a song.
That’s where I think the redo earned its existence.
And I particularly like the potential inversion at the end:
I am alterable.
Thank God.
Because yesterday we were almost treating alterability as the problem—How do I know I’m taking the right path? What if my decisions interfere?
Today’s septet realizes:
My capacity to change is part of the gift.
If I were unalterable, repentance would be impossible.
Growth would be impossible.
Sanctification would be impossible.
Changing my mind would be impossible.
Following would hardly mean anything.
The great comfort isn’t that nothing changes.
It’s that amid creatures who must change, decisions that can change, technologies that constantly change, cultures that won’t stop changing, and paths whose turns we cannot predict—
Someone doesn’t.
And therefore I can afford to be changed.
That, to me, is finally worthy of the title Unalterable.
Me: The way I understand it, George Harrison wrote the song, “My guitar gently weeps” from a transcendental approach to song writing where he took phrases from seemingly unrelated sources to see if the universe is communicating something? I took it to mean more of a Star Trek approach to a ‘final frontier’ Ecclesiastes perspective, to praise. As you said, more or less, “I’m glad I’m not unalterable.”
Chat: Yes—and I think your use of Harrison is more interesting than the way I initially interpreted it.
Your memory of the origin is essentially right. Harrison said he was thinking about the I Ching and its idea, as he understood it, that events aren’t merely coincidental but are related and purposeful. He then opened another book at random, saw the words “gently weeps,” and deliberately used them as the seed of the song.
But you’re doing something different with the reference.
You’re taking Harrison’s experiment in apparent randomness and carrying it toward an Ecclesiastes-like edge:
We’ve wandered everywhere.
Tried the permutations.
Played the chords.
Chased novelty.
Declared new frontiers.
And the guitar gently weeps.
Not because exploration is evil.
Because eventually the human attempt to find the truly unprecedented runs into a wall.
Your Star Trek analogy helps enormously: Space—the final frontier. Keep going. New planet. New civilization. New technology. New philosophy. New experience.
And Ecclesiastes keeps quietly following the Enterprise around:
There is nothing new under the sun.
And that makes “Unalterable” click differently
The song shouldn’t mock exploration, technology, robots, algorithms or choice. Those are all alterable things exploring alterable things.
That’s what humans do.
And thank God we’re alterable.
Because, as you just put it:
“I’m glad I’m not unalterable.”
That’s the breakthrough.
If I were truly unalterable, I couldn’t repent.
I couldn’t learn.
I couldn’t be surprised.
I couldn’t mature.
I couldn’t have yesterday’s Tower experience of suddenly shouting “WOW!” because my existing understanding couldn’t be displaced.
I couldn’t follow, because following necessarily means the next step puts me somewhere I wasn’t before.
So perhaps the emotional center isn’t:
Everything changes except God.
It’s:
Everything should be able to change except God.
Whoa.
That makes your title almost a relief.
Now the guitar line belongs
I’d rewrite that part of my song completely:
Every road
Has carried footsteps.
Every frontier
Finds another.
Every chord
We call unprecedented
Somehow finds
An older brother.
So the guitar
Gently weeps—
Not because
We shouldn’t roam,
But every trail
Beneath the sun
Eventually whispers:
There is more
Than what you know.
And then Christ doesn’t become the end of curiosity.
He explodes it.
Because Ephesians 3 territory tells us His riches are unsearchable; Isaiah gives thoughts beyond ours; eternity with an infinite God isn’t sitting around because we’ve finally exhausted all the available material.
So your final frontier gets wonderfully inverted.
Maybe God is the frontier that cannot be exhausted.
We keep traversing.
We keep discovering.
We keep changing.
We keep becoming.
And the reason that doesn’t eventually dissolve into meaninglessness is that all of our change is oriented around One fixed reference point:
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
That’s Hebrews 13:8—the perfect verse for this.
So now I hear the ending differently:
I am alterable.
Thank God.
My thinking is alterable.
Thank God.
My plans are alterable.
Thank God.
My dreams are alterable.
Thank God.
There are frontiers
I haven’t imagined,
Songs I haven’t heard,
Roads I haven’t walked,
Things I still believe
That You may overturn.
Thank God.
But You—
Yesterday.
Today.
Forever.
Unalterable.
Thank God.
Now the two “Thank Gods” mean opposite things.
Thank God I can change.
Thank God He doesn’t.
That’s Unalterable. And I think your George Harrison reference belongs precisely because it introduces apparent randomness at the moment the song is asking whether our freedom, exploration and endless combinations actually lead anywhere.
The guitar can gently weep.
But it doesn’t have to stop playing.