Small World

Small World

A stranger I spoke to on the phone turned out to be the mother of my oldest niece’s classmate. A speaker I recently shared a platform with happens to be friends with an author whose book I enjoyed immensely—and he kindly connected us. A young pastor I did a project for graduated from my old high school several years after me and told me he rode his bicycle up and down the street I lived on as a child. I shared a literary agent with the husband of my sister’s college roommate. (Twenty years earlier, this same agent was the Young Life leader of one of my former coworkers.) I could go on, but I won’t.

It really is a small world, after all.

Scarcely a week goes by that I do not uncover some amazing, unseen connection between persons or events I had thought were completely unconnected. And God, of course, knows everybody.

In a universe too wide to imagine, we have a God whose hand is as evident in the smallest coincidence as it is in the stars or the sun or the sea. He’s big. Very big. But he still does “small” with deft delight. In a world with far-flung corners, there’s no place he hasn’t been . . . and isn’t still. He’s somehow in between everything that is and all that will ever be. There’s no one I can meet that he doesn’t know down to their darkest secret and no secret of mine that is hidden from him.

He’s the “one degree of separation” that connects me with eternity and the one common thread between me and everyone and everything that’s here and now. In him, it really is a small, small world.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible . . . all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

Colossians 1:15-17, NASB