It’s probably happened to you. You’re having a conversation with a friend, and then a few hours later as you’re browsing social media, an ad pops up promoting something that came up in the conversation before.
My reaction is to always throw my phone across the room in disgust. At least, I imagine myself doing that. Phones are too expensive now for me to be randomly chunking mine across the room, and then add the follow-up therapy, and it would be quite a financial waste. It’s beyond violating though to feel like you’re being listened to and your private conversations are being fed and spit out into some marketing algorithm.
It happened to me again this morning, but the circumstances were way different.
I was getting some advice from a friend to begin thinking about someone specific in my life. I don’t have a lot of contact with this person, and there is a lot of processing and conversation that needs to take place. Then, later in the day, I received a random text. From that person.
Totally out of the blue. “Just saying hi.”
It’s almost as if God was listening in to my private conversation and spitting out a confirmation that He’s in it and that I better pay attention.
It creeps me out to think my phone is always spying on me, but I’m beyond comforted when I receive a gentle reminder like that that God is always listening as well, and has so much more good for me than some random pop-up marketing campaign.