WHAT ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR?

I’m an information guy. When I was in elementary school my mom bought our family a set of World Book encyclopedias. I spent hours upon hours reading those books. As the title suggests my “world” became dramatically larger, as I began to learn about other people, places and things. The encyclopedias of the past have been replaced by the Internet. If you have a device which can access the World Wide Web all the information you’ll ever need is right at your fingertips. And, yes, I am an avid user of the Google search engine. The biggest issue in using Google is you have to know what you’re looking for. (When I first started using the Internet I used a search engine called, Dogpile. Who comes up with these names, right? BTW, it’s still in use.) The word or words you use for your search are hugely important to get the information you’re seeking. As an experiment I entered the three words: world – wide – web into Google and came up with 156,000,000. Try looking through all those results. In my quick calculation I found it would take one year to look through those results if you took five seconds per one. As they say, “Good luck with that!”

I’ve been writing The Transforming Truth blog for about ten months. For much of the time I’ve had a program which provides information on those who read my blog; not their specific identity, but data regarding where they’re from and how they discovered the blog. When people find my blog through a search engine, it shows the specific words they used in their search. Here’s an actual example from today (10/3/11): Someone from Delhi, India used Google and found one of my posts using the words: truth – wins – before – evil. Whenever this happens, and it does so regularly with readers from all over the world, I find myself thinking about them; wondering what’s going on in their life and if my words were of any help to them. Sometimes there almost seems to be a desperation in the words they use and I pray they find the hope and help they are searching for. One time the person searching was from a death row prison in Texas. Was this the day before their execution?

In my next several posts I want to explore the question: “What are you searching for?” Just as it’s important to use the correct words in a Google search, a person has to know what they’re looking for in life. If they don’t, they’ll spend massive amounts of time and energy in futility and frustration. Proverbs 14:12 shares this helpful insight, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” (NIV) Death is about as extreme as it gets, but the point of this proverb is many people heavily invest themselves in “a way that seems right” and the problem, as I see it, is they're pursuing “a way” but not “the way” and a path that “seems right” when it’s not. Another proverb (22:5 NIV) refers to the “paths of the wicked.” Notice that “path” is plural. There are many paths, just as there are many search results when you don’t have a clue what you’re looking for. 

So, what are you searching for? Are you searching for TRUTH, HAPPINESS, PURPOSE, ADVENTURE, LOVE, FULFILLMENT, or A GOOD TIME?

To be continued next time…