Leading With LimitationsSample

It can sometimes be hard to hear the word “search” and not think of Google—or Bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever search engine you use. In fact, in her book Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle writes that “Young people have grown up in a world of search, and information is the end point of search. They have been taught that information is the key to making things better — in fact, to making everything better.”

Psalm 139 models a totally different kind of search. It starts with the phrase, “You have searched me, LORD, and you know me,” and it ends here again with the invitation to “Search me, LORD, and know my heart.” Verses like this model a kind of search where the end goal is not information, but relationship—where we allow God to search us as we search for Him.

It’s hard for some of us to make it through an entire conversation without Googling some sort of factoid to supposedly make the conversation better—or looking for a TikTok as an example of what we’re saying. But conversation is not just about exchanging information and content—it’s an opportunity to cultivate our relationships with others.

An all-knowing God doesn’t need to ask anyone anything, but Jesus made space in his ministry to ask people deep questions, and to have one-on-one conversations. Like the Father asking Adam and Eve where they were in the Garden of Eden, every question Jesus asked His disciples was a question He could have discerned an answer to on His own. But His goal was to cultivate relationships with human beings—not just to accumulate data.

Smartphones are great at giving us information. But the way Jesus asks questions gives us an example of prioritizing dialogue over data collection.