Years ago, I was on a project in southern Colorado. I had brought my mountain bike along, hoping to squeeze in a ride after work. Late one afternoon, I found a quiet dirt trail winding through the foothills. The light was soft, the air cooling.
I was coasting around a bend when a small herd of deer stepped out ahead of me, maybe thirty yards away. I stopped, straddling my bike, just watching them. They paused too. For a long moment, we simply looked at one another.
Something shifted in that stillness. I can’t explain it except to say that I felt like I was being seen. Their eyes held mine, and for an instant, the boundaries dissolved. I wasn’t an observer of nature; I was part of it. It was an acute sense of being poured into something larger than myself.
That moment has stayed with me because it hinted at something I’ve only begun to understand how everything, in its truest form, is connected.
Scripture has been saying this all along:
“In Him we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”Galatians 2:20
“We, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” Romans 12:5
The biblical imagination isn’t about isolated souls but about a shared life, a field of belonging held together in God. Jesus put it plainly: “I am the vine; you are the branches.”
Physicists talk about quantum entanglement, particles remaining connected across distance. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake describes morphic resonance, unseen patterns linking living systems. Chaos theory calls it the butterfly effect: a small motion in one place shaping another across the world. Modern language for an ancient truth. Reality is relational.
Most of us have felt it in small ways: a phone rings just as we think of someone; we sense a loved one’s joy or pain before hearing the news. Beneath everything hums a quiet unity.
This, I think, is the soil from which the mystery of union with Christ grows. If creation itself is bound together, then the Incarnation is God entering that connected field, not from above, but from within. In Jesus, God joins our humanity so that we might awaken to what has always been true: we live in Him, and He in us.
Reflective Question:
What if faith isn’t about finding God somewhere else, but recognizing the divine life already looking back at us?