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Diagnosing Dangerous Drifting Before It Destroys
May 5, 2026 · 28 min
Understand how to stay on course in your spiritual and personal projects with God's guidance.
Series Russell Gray's Morning Muse May 5, 2026 · 28 min · Russell Gray's Morning Muse
Understand how to stay on course in your spiritual and personal projects with God's guidance. ...more Show the full description Show less Understand how to stay on course in your spiritual and personal projects with God's guidance.
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The Peril of Drifting: Lessons from AI and Personal Confession 0:03 Welcome to another Morning Muse. I'm your host, Russell Gray, and I am excited to share with you some thoughts today about drifting. And if you've been working with AI and you've tried to do any type of a0:15 lengthy project, you've probably heard of the word drifting because the project tends to drift. And it reminds me of the book and I've commented on this before by a friend of mine, Sharon Lecter, and0:26 she got a chance to kinda re release and help. I don't know if edit is the right word, but promote certainly a book by Napoleon Hill who wrote Think and Grow Rich called Outwitting the Devil.0:38 And in that, the devil who is being characterized here in the story being interviewed by someone and the devil is forced to reveal and tell the truth about how he pulls people off0:50 track, was talking about how he gets them to drift. And, you know, I'd heard about that and I definitely understand it in my own life, but it really started to come home for1:01 me as I started working with Claude, in this case, the I AI that I'm using to build out this massive project. I'm already, as I'm recording here, 81 sessions in.1:13 And what you do is you set the context for what you're doing with the AI and then the AI helps you think and begins to help you build. In this case, I'm building a very sophisticated1:25 excel workbook around the financial program I'm putting together. And then at the end, it has to orchestrate a hand off, what's called a hand off from the session you're in to the next1:37 session. And what I've realized is that if you don't set good context, then the session fails. Either what happens is the AI agent who's trying to do1:49 the work begins to relitigate the decisions that were being made, begins to reengineer whatever ideas or methodologies you were gonna go about to build out the2:00 formula or take action in whatever way the AI is working on. And then that drifting is then passed on to the next session. And if you're not paying attention, you get 3, 4,2:12 5, 6 sessions down the road and your project has drifted so far off course. You actually have to go back and start all over again or at least go back to the point where the drift began2:24 and reengineer, relitigate, reorganize the whole thing. And I thought about that for a moment and then I I had a chance to reflect on my own life and I had a deadline for this2:36 project. And so I am a little bit ashamed to admit, but sometimes the best lessons are in the mistakes, so I'm confessing to you what I did. And if you've been following me for any length of time, you know that I have2:48 been of the discipline to get up every morning and spend anywhere from an hour to 3 hours with the Lord, with the Holy Spirit, reading the scripture, thinking about what I'm doing in my life, asking2:59 God for guidance and insight and wisdom. And a lot of it has to do with planning my life, my daily activities, my priorities, and I get very specific. I view the lord as3:11 the CEO of my business, as my best adviser, the holy spirit as my greatest mentor, and the scripture is my greatest guide. And everything I am doing in my business life and my personal life3:23 really is subordinated to the master's plan, what I call the master's plan, which is to love God, love your neighbor, and make disciples. So the great commandment, the second commandment, and the great commission. I3:35 call that the master's plan. And if you listen to me, you know, I talk about this all the time. Then underneath that I have mission. So the master's plan is my my global purpose, my universal purpose. The reason God3:47 created me was to love God, love my neighbor and make disciples. I get various missions throughout my life that I work on. There was a season of my life where my mission was to prepare myself to be a husband and then I3:58 became a husband and then to prepare myself to become a father and then become a father and then and then be a father and now my children are raised and and along the way, I had various missions in business to create4:10 a business and some businesses I've created that no longer exist, people that were in my life that are no longer in my life. But for season of time, that was my mission field. These were the people that I was responsible4:23 for ministering to in some way shape or form, loving them, loving my neighbor. And of course at the time I didn't understand that I had these missions. I was just doing whatever I wanted to do, whatever I thought I was4:34 supposed to do. I was aware of God and certainly trying to follow biblical principles. Sometimes I did better that other times. Sometimes I had greater success. And as I've gotten older in life, I've4:46 realized how important it is to really spend time in apprenticeship with the holy spirit to ask for detailed guidance and everything that I'm doing. And I spent 2 years4:58 really preparing for this project that I'm on, and I felt like God had told me it's go time. In December of 20 25, he he said it's go time. And for the first several months5:10 of 20 26, very diligent to continue to spend time with the Lord, very diligent to have what I call mountain experience, mountaintop experiences. Mountain is where you would go to meet with God. Moses would5:21 climb up on the mountain to meet with God and mountains, these these are these mountaintop experiences. And so I was very diligent to do that. And then I got to a point where I had a lot of clarity and I5:33 felt really sure about what I needed to do. I set some deadlines for myself and began to work. And part of the work that I did was to begin to work with Claude, the AI, to help me build out this very5:45 sophisticated financial blueprint for the business that I'm building. And that all sounded good and it was great. And the work that I had done for clarity helped me give great context to Claude so that it was able to5:57 begin to design this tool for me and and work forward and there's just stick with me. I mean, you may not be in business or not at business working on this kind of a project. I think if you're in business at some point6:07 in your life, you are gonna have this kind of a project but that's not the point of this muse. What I'm really talking about is the idea of having that mountain experience and in Exodus 24 25, God is6:19 laying out for Moses the very precise details of how to build the tabernacle and repeatedly tells Moses to be very careful to build according to the pattern I showed you on the6:30 mountain. And so I was being very diligent to do that. But what I did that I'm ashamed of is that I got up every morning and instead of spending my time with the Lord on the mountain,6:42 I was busy working with Claude. I'd get up at 3, 4 in the morning, sometimes 2 or 3 in the morning, and then work immediately. No quiet time, no contemplation, no checking in,6:54 just go go go. And I'm like, it's okay. It's just for a season. And what I discovered is little by little, I was losing context. And because little by little, I was losing context, I7:06 began to drift and I didn't recognize it. You don't recognize drifting until you get much further down the road. And 6 weeks later of this drift, I woke up and I realized that I was7:18 overworking, that I was neglecting my health, that I was neglecting my relationships. And here I am allegedly this evangelist for purpose driven main street capitalism7:30 powered by balance and I'm not practicing what I preach. And I'd ask myself why is that? Well, first, because I got excited and I was very clear. So there's a temptation7:41 to just go and not continue to stay in tight fellowship with the Lord. And you know, you could make the argument there's going to be times and seasons in your life where you're7:53 maybe not as able to spend that time as you'd like to. There's a lot of external pressures. I'm sure that David didn't spend as much time with god when he was busy in the middle of leading a war campaign8:05 versus when he was out tending sheep. But I don't know because I wasn't there. Maybe the entire time he was diligent. I don't know. But for me, I kind of excused myself from the8:17 discipline of spending time with the Lord on that mountaintop experience continuing to delve into clarity, to be apprentice, to pray about the things that were going on, ask for God's guidance,8:29 God's wisdom, God's grace, God's provision, all the things that I had been diligently, faithfully, relentlessly praying for. And it really would set the context for every day that I worked. And so I would have a work8:41 session that wasn't based in context. Well, if you have a work session with an AI, if you're working with Claude on a big project and it's doing work for you and you do not set good context,8:53 you're not gonna get good work or good work product. And then if at the end of that, you're doing a hand off to the next Claude or in my case to the next day, then that hand off is going to9:05 be a little weaker. The context is going to be a little inadequate. In some case, it can be actually wrong. And again, you don't realize it until you get far down the road and you're running9:17 tests and you're looking for specific results. And the result is something very different than what you had planned and you're like, where did I get off track? And so I looked at my life and I thought, you know, here I9:27 am doing the exact thing that is driving me crazy with AI and I have to slow down and get myself back on track. And so this morning, this very morning, I was convicted of that and I said,Causes and Warning Signs of Spiritual Drift 9:39 well, I need to share this. This needs to be a muse and of course you have to ask yourself why does this happen? Well, first of course as I said, you get excited and you just wanna go. So the temptation of being excited9:51 and just wanting to get there fast without maintaining proper discipline. And so what I've learned in business is that when there's a process that you're supposed to follow in order to get from10:03 0.1 to point b, that you have to walk through that process to get from where you are to where you wanna go. And the shortcut isn't to circumvent the process and try to go outside of10:15 the process and then get where you wanna go, but it's to close the gaps between each individual step along the way in the process. So if you have a a scope and sequence10:27 of tasks that you're supposed to do in order to get where you wanna go and say you have a day or 2 between each task, in order to speed things up, you try to take the day10:39 or 2 and condense it to an hour or 2 but you don't skip the task so you don't circumvent the process you accelerate the process but you complete every step of the process. Well I10:50 tried to circumvent the process And so, of course, things were getting left out. Things were being missed. So without proper context, you know, you get yourself in trouble. So you have to be aware that there's a11:01 temptation to circumvent when you're in a hurry. And part of my process is to spend time with the Lord every day to set the context for that day's work so that I can operate11:13 in the most efficient context going through the entire process properly starting with the foundational process of spending time with the Lord. Will I stop doing that? And I said, well, it's only for a few weeks. Well, it11:24 was only supposed to be for a few days, but a few days turned into a week, and then a week turned into a few weeks, and then I wake up 6 weeks later, and I have drifted quite a bit. So the temptation to go11:36 faster is sometimes what causes you to drift and circumvent the process. K? So that's number 1. Number 2 is fear. And you say, well, what are you afraid of? I'm11:48 afraid there won't be enough time. I'm afraid there won't be enough money. I'm afraid that I won't remember everything I need to do and I have to rush through it. Well, I have everything in my mind.12:00 And to a degree, those are real. Right? They wouldn't you wouldn't be afraid of them. Some things you're afraid of that aren't real, some things you are afraid of or concerned about that are real, then you have to begin12:11 to trust. So think of the disciples in the boat and the waves are coming and Jesus is sleeping and the waves are coming and the ship is being tossed and the disciples, they're panicking.12:23 They're like, lord, lord, you know, you're sleeping and don't you care that we're perishing? And he wakes up, he goes, what's the matter with you guys? Where where's your faith? And he rebukes the the waves and12:34 everything calms down, and they realize that God can control things that we can't. God can do things that we can't do. And that if we are with God, if we are walking with12:46 God, if we were inside of God's plan, you know, I can't say there's a promise. Maybe there is. I I don't know. But there's certainly a high probability that God is going to magnify your efforts. He's12:57 going to provide you protections. He's going to give you what I call favorable circumstances. I've that I've experienced in my life. My prayer is, Lord, please give me guiding providence. Right? Open13:09 doors for me. Show me the smooth path, the shortest path between 0.1 and point b. I don't wanna wander in circles. I don't wanna have to do rework. I don't wanna waste time on faulty relationships. I don't want to drift.13:23 And yet I did. Right? And then I said, give me favorable circumstances. Give me guiding providence in favorable circumstances. The other thing I talk about is magnifying my resources. So I I don't have enough.13:35 Right? We got 5000 people. Lord, there's 5000 people here that have followed you, and we can't send them away hungry, but all we've got is 5 loaves and a couple of fish. And the Lord multiplied that and13:47 was able to create enough resources to to feed everybody, to provide for everybody. And so I have that fear of, like, I gotta get this done. I've got to get this project over the line. I've got to get back13:58 to revenue generation. I've got to get back to lead generation. I've got to get back to creating content. There's not enough time. I don't have enough money. Right? Scarcity, scarcity, scarcity, scarcity.14:11 And yet the Martha and Mary thing. Martha is busy attending to everybody at the party. Mary is spending time with Jesus. And Jesus says, Martha, you're worried about a lot of things, but14:22 Mary has chosen the better way to spend time with me. So all the lessons are there in scripture and we know them maybe if we read our bible and we really think about it, but knowing and14:34 applying are 2 different things. And so here I am, like, paying attention to all this stuff. I know this stuff cold. I don't have to flip open my bible. I know it. And yet here I am drifting. And so14:46 I think that what is important is to understand that time with God every day is a chance to set the context for the work that you want to do in the session. So if you're 1 of those people that's out there working with14:58 AI already, you know what I'm talking about. If you're not, then when you start, you're gonna find out. And if not, then the principle still is the same whether you work with a or I or not. This is just a very practical,15:10 real life lesson that a lot of people in business are experiencing that if you don't set real life lesson that a lot of people in business are experiencing that if you don't set the context, the work session is not gonna15:17 be as productive. I believe that's true in your life. And so spending time with the lord to set the context, very, very important. And then the other thing is is to make sure that the handoff is good15:30 and that is the handoff between you and the holy spirit. I'm big on journaling. I think that's important and I haven't been journaling. I haven't had a journal entry, a personal journal entry for many weeks now. And so15:42 for me, that's a clue. So I wanna talk about some of the ways I know that I'm drifting. And first of all, it shows up in my schedule. If my schedule doesn't have me spending time with15:54 the lord every day, then I've drifted. If my schedule has me too exhausted to give quality time to my wife or my important relationships, then I've drifted. If I'm16:05 not able to be attentive to my health and my other responsibilities and I'm severely out of balance and it goes on for more than just a moment, you know, a day or 216:18 and I can't get quickly on track, I am at danger of getting very far off course and drifting very far from my primary responsibilities. So my schedule is a big clue16:30 about whether or not I'm drifting. The second thing is my emotional state. Am I at peace or am I in panic? So there's peace and there's panic. And so the16:42 disciples that were in the ship, they were panicked. They weren't at peace. Jesus was at peace. He was sleeping like a baby. He had he's having peaceful slumber while the ship was tossing to and fro while16:53 the disciples were in a panic. And so if your emotional state is panic, then you have forgotten that you're with the lord, that the lord is with you. And these guys were reminded by17:05 Jesus, hey, I'm right here guys, we're okay. Now I'm not saying you don't have some anxiety and, you know, sometimes that's good. Sometimes fear is a wake up call to let you know that there's17:17 pain. But Jesus didn't come for us to live in fear. He says, I've come to give you peace and a a sound mind and and I think it's first or second Timothy chapter 1. And so I think if you are in17:29 more of a state of panic as your normal operating system, you know, your your mindset, your heart is typically in a panic mode, you're stressed, then I think that that's probably told you you've drifted. Then17:40 it's a time to slow down and what I ended up doing this morning, which is part of what triggered it, is I was so anxious to keep my project moving. I realized that I needed to17:52 slow down and I need to do open up a session with Claude and not attempt to get any work done but simply get the project back on track. So the assignment18:04 was help me pick up the pieces, reset the context and our whole mission for this session is not to do any work but just prepare the next session to have a successful18:16 productive session. So sometimes you have to slow down to go faster. Sometimes you need to stop and not panic but reset and of course that reset is18:27 quality time with the Lord. And the other third way that I think you can know that you're drifting is you're constantly doing rework. If your quality is beginning to slip, if instead of growingThe Process to Stay on Course: Architect, Build, and Improve 18:39 your relationships, instead of enjoying your relationships, instead of nurturing your relationships, you're constantly repairing them, apologizing, dealing with upset18:51 feelings, trying to figure out why people are upset with you, why there's disappointment, frustration, anxiety, then I think when you're having to rework and you're not building something but you're just reestablishing a19:03 foundation when there's a lot of repair work or a lot of rework going on and that's true for your health, it's true for your business planning, it's true for your finances. So to me, the 3 are your schedule is gonna tell19:14 you when you're drifting, your demeanor, peace or panic is gonna tell you if you're drifting and when you are working are you patching things up or you're actually building and if you're not building, if you're not at19:25 peace and if your schedule isn't balanced you probably begin to drift quite a bit. And so to me the process that I use in business is very applicable to your walk with the lord. It's very19:36 applicable to your relationships. It's very applicable to your health. It's really a process of perpetual improvement and the way it works is there are steps. And the first19:48 thing is architecting or visioning, imagineering if you will. You're thinking about the way you want your life to be, the way God wants your life to be, purpose and mission and vision.20:00 And the scripture's clear without a vision people perish. They drift. They can't discipline themselves. If you really look at the root word there about perish, it's about cast off discipline. Right? Without a vision the20:12 people cast off restraint. They lack discipline. They don't have something to discipline themselves to. They can't see the path. So architect is getting a clear vision and then you begin to blueprint that20:24 into tasks and a schedule and beginning to assign and allocate time and focus and energy to whatever you're working on. It could be working out, could be food preparation, it could be20:36 quality time in conversations with important people in your life and clearly the most important person in your life is the lord. And so you have to blueprint that time. It doesn't just happen by accident. You don't just20:48 hand a construction team, a build team, a drawing of a house, say build me this house, there's a blueprint involved and this is where all the plumbing is, this is where the20:59 wiring is, this is where the doors go, this is the framing, this is the foundation, here's how we're gonna handle the sewer. I mean, there's a lot of detail work that goes into blueprinting whatever you're doing And I21:10 think that's true in many aspects of our life. So there's architecting and then there's blueprinting. And then you begin to build. You actually begin to take action and assemble things and organize resources21:22 and build relationships and build your portfolio and begin to recruit team members and build processes and put in place systems. So you begin to build. And then once it's all assembled, you implement. So21:33 maybe you're building a relationship with someone and then eventually you implement by proposing and you pick a marriage date and you begin to build a life together. Maybe you begin to plan having children and then you21:43 have the children and now you're building a new human being and a family and a household to raise that child in. Maybe it's a business. This is the process I go through in building a business. And then once you've21:54 implemented, you begin to operate. You begin to work every day. Right? The relationships in motion. The business is in motion. Your health routine is in motion. And then you get feedback. How are we doing? How's my blood22:06 pressure? How are my blood levels? How is my weight? How is my body mass composition? How is the quality of my relationships? How happy is my spouse? How happy are my children? How happy22:17 are my employees or my team members? How well is my business performing? What's my cash flow in my personal life or in my business? How's my balance sheet doing? So you begin to measure and then the22:29 feedback you get from those measurements goes back to now what can we do to improve and that's rearchitecting, revisioning. So you either have to re blueprint or, for example, if you look at your blueprint22:41 and you say, hey, this is not structurally possible. In other I give you an example. If you are an architect and somebody came to you and said, hey, here's my vision. I wanna have a multi story house. I want it to be22:52 about 20000 square feet, and I want the second story, the whole thing to be a pool. So I've got a 10000 square foot pool with a glass bottom. And you say, I don't want any support. I just23:04 wanna be able to see all the water. And the architect goes, great. I can draw it on a piece of paper. Well, you give it to the engineer and the engineer goes, you know, that that all looks good on paper. But in the real23:15 world, you can't do that. That glass would have to be about 4 feet thick. You're not gonna be able to do it. It's structurally impossible. And so there are gonna be times when you have things you wanna do in your life23:24 and you look at it and the engineering says, you know, you only have 24 hours in a day, you only have 7 days a week, you only have 52 weeks in a year, and you only have so many years in this life. So you may23:36 have this big grand vision for what you want, but the constraints are it's not actually from an engineering perspective possible. And so you're going to have to choose. You may have to compromise a little23:48 bit between what's possible and what you want. And, yes, I know that the lord is lord of the impossible and he can do things that we can only imagine or sometimes can't even imagine, you know, but24:00 in the real world, you're gonna be constrained by some limitations and God can stretch those a bit but most of the laws that we're constrained by are laws that God24:11 created. If you think about it, the laws of nature, the laws of physics, right? These are laws that God created. And so is it realistic to say that we should be able to break the laws that God created24:24 to go do something that we wanna do? I think the answer earth from rotating and let the day shine if he wants to?24:35 Well, yeah. He did that in the bible once. That's God's prerogative. He can do that. Can God resurrect somebody from the dead? Yeah. Can God allow somebody pass from this life to the next without passing through death?24:47 Yes. But is that the rule? Not at all. It's the exception. And I don't know that you can build a business plan or a life or anything on exceptions. So I think you have to engineer whatever you're24:59 doing based on the rule. And so if you if you kinda master this process, I have found when I adhere to the process, when I discipline the process, when I am disciplined not to circumvent the25:11 process, more often than not I have success in my relationships, in my health, in my business, in my personal finances. When I fail to honor the process and keep the process,25:23 then that's usually when I have a problem. And so I woke up this morning and realized that I had circumvented the process of Psalm 1 27. Unless the lord builds a house, you labor in vain to build it. It's vain for25:35 you to get up early and stay up late and eat the bread of sorrows for so he gives his beloved rest. And so I've been sleeping 3 and 4 hours a night. I've been going 6, 7 days25:47 a week. I've been not working out. I've been not spending quality time with my wife. I've been not spending quality time with the lord and you wake up 5, 6 weeks later and you wonder why25:58 everything's a mess. Now, I fortunately, the Lord woke me up before everything was a mess and I have a very gracious wife and I think I had a pretty good basis of health. I could abuse myself like that for a little26:09 while, but I was in real danger of it becoming the new normal and it becoming a lifestyle. And just thank God that he woke me up and said, Russ, you're not setting the26:21 context for your daily productivity. And because of that, you can expect there's going to be drift day after day after day and if you continue on this path,26:33 you're gonna be so off course you don't have a prayer of fulfilling your mission and building your vision, you're going to end up a very sad, unhappy,26:45 broken person with broken relationships and I I just praise God that he woke me up. And so I hope this encourages you. If if you're an ambitious capitalist,26:56 you probably face these temptations very much that's why the ministry is purpose driven, main street capitalism powered by balance, and I've gotta practice what I preach. And so27:08 I am confessing to you that I drifted and how I caught myself. And so again, take a look at your schedule. Take a look at your demeanor. Are you at peace? Are you in27:20 panic? Are you spending more time rebuilding, patching up, or are you actually building and making good progress? If you're not, I would venture to say the context is wrong and the answer is going to be27:32 more quality time with God on the mountain top and ask him to give you the detailed blueprint for how you can build a life that will honor him, fulfill your purpose,27:44 the master's plan, love God, love your neighbor, make disciples, and how you can accomplish your mission, whatever mission he has you on at this season in your life, in your family life, in your health life, in your27:55 business life, in your portfolio life, whatever aspects of your life that you're working on right now. So let me know what you think. I'd love to hear from you. Feedback at russell gray dot com. Until next time, may you28:07 be blessed to be a blessing.In this video 0:00 The Peril of Drifting: Lessons from AI and Personal Confession9:30 Causes and Warning Signs of Spiritual Drift18:30 The Process to Stay on Course: Architect, Build, and Improve
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