Holy Curiosity: Everything We Need Is in the Word

Can I confess something? My brain has tabs. Lots of them. I sit down to read my Bible, and within five minutes I’m wondering what the disciples ate for breakfast. Then I’m wondering whether Martha ever got a thank-you note. Before long, I’m wondering what Jesus was like at fifteen. Did He have chores? Did He roll His eyes at Joseph? (Okay, no. He was sinless. But you see where my mind goes.)

Squirrel!

If you’re a woman like me, you know this moment well. One minute you’re focused. Next, you’re three rabbit trails deep with no memory of how you got there. So is all that wondering a problem? Not necessarily. There’s such a thing as holy curiosity, and God made us curious on purpose. The real question is what we do with our curiosity and where we go looking for answers.

What God Left Out on Purpose

The Gospels leave some big gaps. We get Jesus’s birth and one scene at age twelve. After that, the story jumps to His public ministry around age thirty. In fact, those eighteen years are summed up in a single verse: “And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52).

That’s it. That’s the Holy Spirit’s own summary of Jesus’s teenage years.

It’s tempting to treat that silence like a missing puzzle piece. However, Scripture doesn’t leave things out by accident. Moses told Israel, “The secret things belong to Yahweh our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). Similarly, John says that Jesus did many other things that weren’t written down. Yet “these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

In other words, the Bible is edited. Carefully and purposefully, by God Himself. What’s there is what we need.

Two Women, Two Kinds of Curiosity

I keep coming back to two women in Scripture who both wondered.

The first is Eve. The serpent came to her with a question: “Indeed, has God said…?” (Genesis 3:1). He pointed her curiosity at the one thing God had withheld. Suddenly, everything she’d been given didn’t seem like enough. As a result, her wondering pulled her away from God’s word and toward what He had not given.

The second is Mary. Think about this for a moment. Mary is the one person who actually knew what Jesus was like as a boy. She changed His diapers and taught Him to walk. She lived with Him through all those silent years. So what does Scripture record about her? That she “treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19, and again in 2:51).

Mary had every detail we’re curious about. Even so, the Holy Spirit chose to record her pondering, not the details. Her wondering led her toward worship. She held what she knew with awe and was content to leave the rest with God.

That’s holy curiosity. Both women wondered, but one wondered her way into sin, while the other wondered her way into worship. I want to live like Mary.

When Curiosity Goes Looking

Here’s where the squirrel can get us into real trouble. When curiosity isn’t satisfied by what God gave, it goes looking elsewhere.

Church history shows us exactly what happens. In the centuries after the apostles, people wrote “gospels” to fill in the gaps of Jesus’s childhood. For example, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas has little boy Jesus striking other children dead when they annoy Him. Yikes. That’s what human imagination produced when it tried to improve on God’s silence. It’s also one reason the early church rejected those writings.

Today, we have our own versions. There are dramatized films and TV series. There are novels that give Bible women inner lives and romances. There are devotionals that tell us what Jesus “might have said.” Some of these can be enjoyable. Still, they all carry the same risk: the invented parts start to feel as real as the true parts.

I’ll be honest. When The Chosen first came out, I was drawn in. It was beautifully made, and I loved seeing the Gospels come alive. But the longer I watched, the more liberties I noticed. Eventually, I found myself more frustrated than blessed. Scenes and dialogue that aren’t in Scripture were shaping how I pictured the real ones.

I often hear the defense, “But it points people to Scripture!” I pray that it does. But that claim is worth testing, not just assuming. The Bereans in Acts 17 were commended because they were “examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11). So here’s the honest question. After watching, are we opening our Bibles to compare? Or is the show quietly becoming the version of the story we remember?

Everything We Need Is Already in the Word

What strikes me most is this: the deepest question behind our curiosity is usually already answered in Scripture.

Why do we want to know what Jesus was like as a teenager? Often, it’s because we want to know He understands us. We want to know He’s been there and that He gets it.

And He does. Hebrews 4:15 tells us we have a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses, “one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.” He knows every awkward, lonely, pressured, or confusing season you’ve walked through. We don’t need an invented scene to prove it, because God already told us.

That’s the pattern. When we bring our questions back to the Word, we usually find that God has already answered the question underneath the question.

How to Practice Holy Curiosity

So what do we do with our wandering minds? Here are a few thoughts.

Let wondering lead to worship. When your mind drifts toward something Scripture doesn’t say, ask what it does say. Then stop and ponder that, just as Mary did.

Take the thought captive. Paul calls us to take “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). This doesn’t mean we stop thinking. Rather, it means our thoughts come home to Christ.

Be a Berean. Whatever you watch, read, or listen to, compare it to the text. If you can’t find it in Scripture, hold it loosely.

Trust the edit. God gave us exactly what we need for life and godliness. His silence isn’t a hole to fill. Instead, it’s an invitation to trust Him.

Pondering Like Mary

I don’t want to become so rigid that I never let myself wonder. After all, God gave us imaginations. There’s a holy kind of awe that comes from sitting with a passage and marveling at it. Holy curiosity is a gift when it leads us deeper into what God has said.

So I want my wondering to look like Mary’s, not Eve’s. I want to be content with what He’s revealed, treasure it, ponder it, and trust Him with the rest.

The next time your brain yells “Squirrel!” in the middle of your Bible reading, don’t beat yourself up. Just gently bring that squirrel back to the Word. Everything you truly need is already there.

What rabbit trails does your mind tend to wander down? How could you turn that curiosity back toward what God has already revealed?