I’ve been at a corporate event for my “other” job this week and one of the focuses has been a pending company rebrand. There’s been a ton of discussion about how the digital age has transformed how we all live, and in turn, do our business. One of the speakers shared an incredible stat about how fast we can reach people. He said that it took 75 years for the telephone to have 50 million global users. The game Angry Birds reached the 50 million user milestone in 11 days. The speed at which we gain access to information is staggering, but one of the risks is that our message and meaning can be lost in the noise. And there is a LOT of noise today. Imagine if you could take every piece of the written word from the beginning of time until 2004 and total it all up. Put it in a book. Imagine the size of it. How many libraries would that fill? Since 2004, that amount of content has been duplicated 7 million times. 7 million times. How do you even engage with people when we all have that amount of noise to filter through? I believe that our personal engagement with people is at an all time low. Technology has made it so easy to have superficial and shallow relationships. Facebook has single-handedly ruined the high school reunion market. I believe the main reason people ever went to a high school reunion was out of curiosity. Now that you can stalk your old classmates digitally, the curiosity is dead, and with it, the relationships that follow. We have become a society where we judge people on the width (quantity) of their relationships instead of the depth (quality) of their relationships. Jesus modeled the way to overcome this. His ministry had plenty of width to it. He travelled and spoke with the masses. Because of time and circumstance, he didn’t have time to dig deep with most of the people he encountered. But the way he overcame this was by investing in the lives of his twelve disciples. These twelve men were the way Jesus elected to carry forward his ministry. He often told a parable to the masses, but then would only explain it to the disciples. He explained the “why” behind his teachings mainly in private, and only to these twelve. To take it even a step further, he went even deeper with three of his disciples, Peter, James, & John. He elected to pull these three aside even more frequently, had private teaching sessions, and tutored them on the Gospel. You see, Jesus understood that no matter the width of his ministry, it was pointless without the depth. These are the men that took the Good News and spread it after the crucifixion, and they were only able to do it because of the depth in which Jesus invested in them. I do not want to be known as a person whose relationships are a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t last. I want relationships that are an inch wide and a mile deep, because it is that depth that allows meaningful, real, and lasting impacts.