“These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.” – John 15:11-15

So this Father’s Day, my dad and I started the holiday by talking about AI. Now, views on it aside, one of the things my dad and I realized is that it wasn’t a question about using AI, it was why and how. Why was AI being used, and how was it being used? After we asked that question, many more popped up. Is using it as a tool to make life more efficient, to simplify things, bad, or cheating? Will it ease work or make it more difficult? Can and should it replace the human element in work?

So many questions and so many answers. We really could have sat there and discussed it all day (my dad is my nerdy best friend!), but there was Church to get to. So the questions were left for another day, another time to fully dive in and study. Another time to simply talk with my dad, since he was my first best friend.

That’s when I realized the importance of fun studying. 

There are always going to be questions that we cannot answer. Questions that are left for a moment, when we can sit with God and talk with Him. When we can have these wild, open, free discussions with Him. Where God is our best friend, enjoying and learning with us. 

Are we allowing time to just have a fun study time with God?

Not looking for an answer to better our lives or fix something wrong. Do we take the time to just sit with God and talk with Him? Let there be questions and questions of wonder, curiosity, and most importantly, a desire to keep understanding. Where we discuss AI and its uses (there was even a moment I did inject spirituality in the conversation with my dad), or maybe talk to God about the show/movie/TikTok recently watched, and see what He thinks of it. Have we vented to God about work and then listened to His comfort or advice? What happened to God being our best friend?

This question came to me as I was deciding today what to write. I usually set aside time to study, and I wanted to study simplicity and wisdom. Yet a question kept ringing in my spirit: Was I having fun? Was I studying with God like I did with my sisters and mother on Saturdays when we were kids? Did the discussion with God open more questions like it does with my dad and my friend? Was I letting God be my friend? Or was I just going forward, looking for an answer because the product was more important than the process?

A lot of us are used to school studying, where there always has to be an answer. We have to be ready to present our findings. We have to be right. And for us Christians, doesn’t the Bible say to study to show thyself approved? (2 Timothy 2:15 KJV) 

The Bible does say that and calls Him, teacher (rabbi). God wants us to have these studies where we can look back and see our progress, our growth. Yet, that is not all studying is for. To God, showing ourselves approved is about showing ourselves as tried. That we are trying and living life. Not that we know all the answers. 

Simply put, God wants us and others to see how we live with God. He wants to show how we discuss and talk with Him. He is our teacher, our master, our father, and our friend. Yet, sometimes it can be easier to limit God to just what we need at the moment, and He will be that. Just know that He wants to be so much more. 

God is more than just an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. He is everything. 

Are you letting Him be everything?