One (Part 1)

When you walk through a forest in dead silence, a whole symphony of communication is occurring right beneath your feet. 

In a book I finished recently called “Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices For a World Gone Mad”, author John Eldridge lays out the ways trees communicate: 

“When one tree in a forest is diseased, the other trees will send critical nutrition to it through the interconnection of the root system and fungi “network” in the forest floor, supporting the ill tree until it is well again. Trees will also communicate with one another in this way.”

This blows my mind. The trees appear to stand alone, but they are so incredibly dependent on one another. The entanglement of roots below each tree is crucial to their livelihood.

Eldridge translates this interconnectedness within the forest to the interconnectedness God desires us to have with Him. 

Need scriptural context? Take a look at John 17:20-23: 

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

??

First, Jesus prays that all of us as believers may be one (more on this in the next blog). Then, He prays for us to be one with Him. 

It was Jesus desire and prayer that we might have the same kind of union with Him as He did with His Father. 

This quote by Eldridge has been resonating so deeply within me recently: 

“Your very being is made to be saturated by the being of God. You can have faith in God from a distance; you can have a “relationship” with Christ, but not be intimate. You can even find an intimacy with Christ, or your Father, or the Holy Spirit, and not be inhabited, interwoven, saturated…We are after union, oneness— where our and God’s Being become intertwined. The substance of our life— our personality, our heart, our physicality, all of our experience—is filled over time to saturation with the substance of God’s life.”

This season, for me, has been one of intimacy. The Lord has been revealing Himself in ways that I’ve never known Him as before. It has been so sweet. 

But what a startling and alarming truth: It doesn’t stop at faith in God, relationship with Him, or even intimacy with Him. We get to hold to His promise with so much expectancy! He wants more; He wants our whole hearts. He wants union with us. He didn’t make us for closeness; He made us to be consumed and saturated with the fullness of His Being. 

I know: this concept of “union” seems pretty vague. What does that look like tangibly in our own lives? How do we strive for that union with the Lord? 

As I was reflecting on this, I realized that it’s not something we achieve through any human means. Union is more of an invitation on our part; welcoming the Father to come in and fill all that we are. When we invite, He comes. Unity is certainly a journey that could last a lifetime. But we get to live with such expectancy as we discover what it looks like to walk in union with the Lord. 

In my next blog post, I’ll talk about how this unity translates into our relationships! Stay tuned 🙂

Emma 

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***Quotes taken from:

Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices For a World Gone Mad 

by John Eldridge