The Mechanic Who Heard What the Engineers Couldn't

In 2019, a team of aerospace engineers at a Boeing supplier in Wichita, Kansas, spent three weeks trying to diagnose a persistent vibration in a turbine assembly. They ran computer simulations, analyzed frequency data, and debated competing theories in conference rooms lined with whiteboards full of equations. Nothing worked.

Then a veteran mechanic named Dale Gunderson — a man with no engineering degree and grease permanently embedded under his fingernails — walked onto the shop floor, placed his palm flat against the housing, closed his eyes, and listened. Within forty seconds he said, "Your third-stage bearing cage is micro-fractured. Right side." He was exactly right.

Dale couldn't explain the math behind what he felt. He couldn't write the formula. But thirty-one years of daily, intimate contact with those machines had given him a kind of knowing that no simulation could replicate. His knowledge didn't come from textbooks. It came from relationship.

Paul tells the Corinthians that God's deepest wisdom isn't accessed through brilliant rhetoric or intellectual credentials. "The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God," he writes. Just as Dale's years of hands-on intimacy with those engines gave him perception the educated experts lacked, the Holy Spirit gives believers access to truths that no amount of human cleverness can reach. The natural mind analyzes from the outside. The Spirit knows from within — because the Spirit knows the very mind of God.