The Flood Is Here: How We Are Preparing
Co-authored with Ron Roberts
A breakfast sandwich in New York now runs twenty-two dollars. Gas is brushing nine dollars a gallon in parts of California. Families we know are making cuts they never imagined. Friends we love are burning out, breaking down, or quietly losing hope.
The headlines keep getting stranger. Corruption in plain sight. Graft treated like sport. Power protecting power. Institutions we grew up trusting are revealing themselves to be captured, compromised, or simply too brittle to carry the weight they were built for. Too many powerful forces want war for there to be peace. Too many interests profit from chaos to allow stability.
This is the flood.
If you have been feeling the ground shift under you and wondering whether it is just you, it is not just you. The unusual time our parents grew up in is over. That long stretch of steady progress through the eighties and nineties was the aberration. What we are entering now is closer to the historical norm: instability as a baseline condition, rising until something gives.
And on top of it all sits AI. An accelerator of everything. It speeds up good work and evil work with equal indifference. It compresses time. It widens the gap between the people who know how to use it and the people who do not. It makes the fragile more fragile and the strong more potent.
The age of self-reliance is over. That does not mean the age of responsibility is over. It means we are entering a season where no one gets through this alone, and no one gets through this without the One who made the waters.
We are Gary Sheng and Ron Roberts. We are friends and fellows moving through this season together, sharpening each other on our Christ-centered walk. We both serve Applied AI Society, Gary as executive director and Ron as strategic advisor. This piece is an honest note from two brothers about what we are seeing, what we are doing about it, and what we believe a faithful response looks like.
If any of this resonates, we hope it nudges you to take your life more seriously, to draw nearer to God, and to get suited up for the work already in front of you.
You Cannot Lean Into Fear
The temptation in a season like this is to lean into fear. To hoard. To isolate. To grow cynical. To assume the worst about every stranger and every institution.
We are not immune. One of the hardest disciplines for both of us has been faith that doing the right thing will actually pay off. We are still growing into it. The flesh wants insurance. It wants certainty. It wants a strategic hedge. God keeps asking for something simpler and harder: trust Him, walk obediently, and stop trying to earn in advance what He has already promised to provide.
Jesus' words in Matthew 6 feel less like a devotional and more like a field manual right now. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
That verse is no excuse for laziness. It is a correction of our posture. Work hard. Plan wisely. Build. Do all of it from a place of trust. Panic is downstream of forgetting who is actually in charge.
The deeper truth is that only grace will save us from the omni-crisis. If fear is the dominant emotion in your body right now, start there.
How We Are Preparing
Here is what doubling down actually looks like for us. Concrete choices, not categories.
1. Making God our best friend
Everything else flows from this. If you are not in constant communion with the Lord through prayer, worship, Scripture, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, every other preparation will crack under pressure.
Obedience is everything. The only way to walk through the flood is to let God swing you. You cannot plan your way through it. You cannot optimize your way through it. Moment-by-moment obedience to the nudges and explicit instructions of the Holy Spirit is the whole game. This is the foundation. Without it, nothing else holds.
2. Spirit-led relationships
We are being more intentional about who gets our deepest time and energy.
God puts all kinds of people in your path, and you are called to love and witness to every one of them. That never changes. What is changing for us is who we run to for counsel, for prayer, for sharpening. Our inner circles now consist of people who are clearly moving in the Spirit. Praying without ceasing. Obedient in the small things. Willing to hear hard truths and speak them. Willing to pray for each other mid-conversation when the Holy Spirit prompts.
This is not about cutting people out of your life. It is about knowing who to lean on when the flood rises. The people in the boat with you matter more than almost anything else.
3. Walking the narrow path joyfully
The narrow path is narrow for a reason. It is the path where the 100x relationships, the 100x opportunities, and the 100x revelations actually live. Everything outside of it is a diluted counterfeit.
This is the 100x choice. If it is not a heaven's yes, it is a no.
In practice, this has meant saying no to a lot. Flashy, dopamine-hit speaking opportunities. Podcast appearances that would have grown our reach but pulled us from deep work. Partnerships with people whose character did not match their claims. Social obligations that would have drained us and produced nothing of Kingdom value.
There is a deeper logic behind these noes. We made the case in The Death of Celebrity: AI has gutted the attention-economy model of fame. Hollywood is over. It is all Internet now. Soul is the new scarcity. The people who will actually matter in what comes next are substantive builders with genuine conviction, putting real work into the world. For the faithful, this is a gift. The flood is clearing the field, and attention-hoarding was never the Kingdom's game anyway.
Every no we say is an implicit yes to the work God actually put in front of us. The narrow path is not a punishment. It is the path that has the 100x on it. Walking it joyfully is the posture that keeps you on it long enough for the fruit to come in.
4. Onboarding to a sovereignty stack
As centralized systems become more fragile, local and sovereign alternatives become more valuable. Local food. Local community. Local hardware. Local trust networks. Skills you own. Tools you control. And, increasingly, AI you direct.
We are not homesteaders. We are not preppers. We are normal people trying to move in the right direction with grace. The sovereignty stack is aspirational for most of us, and we are onboarding to it incrementally, the same way most of you will.
What this looks like for us in practice right now: paying more attention to where our food comes from, investing in our local communities and churches, owning our tools rather than renting them where possible, cultivating real friendships with people who can actually show up at our door if things get harder.
The most load-bearing piece of the stack right now is AI literacy. Strategy is the new execution. The bottleneck for almost everyone we respect has become the ability to process a complex operational reality fast enough to make wise decisions on a short clock. AI, used well, helps us do that. It helps us see clearly, think clearly, and move quickly, informed by the Holy Spirit. It is not a replacement for discernment. It is a force multiplier for a discerned life.
We will keep saying this because it matters: if ordinary people and faithful Christians do not close the hyperagency gap in the next twelve to twenty-four months, the powerful will consolidate even further. The flood is already sorting people into those who can leverage AI and those who cannot. We would like the faithful to be counted among the former.
This is the deeper reason we have leaned in so hard with Applied AI Society. We are working to democratize access to advanced AI literacy so the people most likely to build life-giving families, businesses, and ministries are not left behind. If you want to suit up, start with the Personal Agentic OS concept and work outward from there.
To say it plainly: AAS is one of the boards in the ark we are building. Not the whole ark. Not the only ark. But a foundational piece of it. A truly benevolent organization whose job is to raise the floor so that no one who chooses to climb in has to drown. We use the flood metaphor without apology, including with people who do not yet believe in God, because it is the right metaphor for the moment. A lot of people will go under if those of us who can build the ark do not move quickly. Our part of the work is making sure the people of competence and conscience have the tools, the training, and the community to stay above the waterline and pull others up with them.
What AI does not do for us: it does not decide who we spend time with. It does not pray for us. It does not hear from God on our behalf. Discernment is an irreplaceable spiritual skill and always will be. We use AI for operational compression. We reserve the interior life for the Lord.
If any of this feels overwhelming, start with one. Pick the weakest link in your dependency on fragile centralized systems and begin to shore it up.
5. Favormaxxing through obedience
We joke about wanting to favormax. To look lucky to the outside world. To have things keep unlocking at the right time, with the right people, in the right sequence.
The secret, as far as we can tell, is that favor is not something you generate. It is something God pours out on an obedient life. Every genuine unlock we have experienced in the last year has followed the same pattern: a Holy Spirit nudge, an act of obedience (often costly), and then something unexpected opening up on God's timeline, not ours. This is the logic of favormaxxing.
We believe the world is about to get a lot harder for people operating purely on their own power, and a lot more abundant, in the real sense, for those walking obediently. The favor of God is not a prosperity gospel promise. It is the natural consequence of being used well by the One who has the whole river in His hands.
Why Any of This Matters
We are not preparing for the flood because we think the sky is falling. We are preparing because the people who come out the other side will be the ones who built their houses on rock. We want to be counted among them, and more importantly, we want our communities to be counted among them.
Ron cares deeply about the community he grew up in. Compton. He wants it to prosper through this transition, not to get left further behind as the powerful consolidate and the vulnerable get squeezed. The gospel is the only thing we know of that renews a place at the root. Everything else is palliative.
Gary thinks a lot about the kids he hopes to raise with his future wife. About the nieces and nephews already here. About the generation that will inherit whatever we build or fail to build. CS Lewis said, "Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage." We want to be those brave knights in the lives of the children watching us, even the children not yet born.
This is ultimately about role-modeling. For our future kids. For our communities. For the Christian-curious person reading this. For everyone quietly watching whether faith in Christ actually holds up under pressure.
It does. We have staked our lives on it.
Come to Christ. Then Suit Up.
If you are not yet walking with Christ, that is the first step. Pray. Pick up a Bible. Find a spirit-led community of believers who will sharpen you.
If you are already walking with Christ, get suited up. Clear out what is not a heaven's yes. Tighten your circle to people moving in the Spirit. Start somewhere on the sovereignty stack. Close your hyperagency gap. Become someone God can swing.
The flood is here. The age of self-reliance is over. God has got you. Be obedient. Do the right thing, even when the return looks invisible. Trust that He is the One who unlocks the right things at the right time.
We will see you on the narrow path.
Gary and Ron
Related: The Window Before The Grid | Obedience Is Everything | Only Grace Will Save Us From The Omni-Crisis | Favormaxxing | The 100x Choice | The True Hyperagent