The Power of Connection

Paul addressed his first letter to the church at Corinth by saying:
2 To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ--their Lord and ours:
3 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
4 I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.

We are each part of the body of Christ, the church of the living God, and because the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us and all who call upon the name of Jesus, we are connected - one with Him and with each other.   And, because God has placed us in the world with millions of other people, we share the globe with them, and the Lord will use relationships to bring glory to His name, to fulfill His purposes, to touch each other's lives, sometimes in profound ways.  We are not called to our own little spheres in isolation, but we are called to recognize the big picture and to make the most of those connections that God has given to us.

Paul gives us a sense of the "big picture" of how we are connected by the Lord in Romans chapter 1:
8 I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world.
9 God, whom I serve with my whole heart in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you
10 in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God's will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

Did you know that Google has added yet another feature to its already rich stable of so-called "easter eggs"?   To back up just a bit, an easter egg is described as some sort of intentional hidden message or even a humorous response, that is hidden and brought to light when you type in a certain phrase or set of commands.   For instance, typing "let it snow" into the Google search bar will result in the effect of snow falling across your computer screen.  If you type in a request for directions from New York to London or perhaps other locales involving a trip across the ocean, you might see instructions for swimming, jetskiing, or kayaking. 

And the latest - type in the words "Bacon number", followed by the name of a Hollywood actor.  This is a take-off on what the website, oracleofbacon.org has been doing for years - the premise is that most actors are within 6 degrees of separation from the actor Kevin Bacon, of such films as "Footloose", "A Few Good Men", or "Apollo 13".   This game has been around for years, and plays off the premise that someone who has been in a film with Bacon, or someone else who has been in a film with Bacon, and so on.   The actor's "Bacon number" represents the number of connections that it takes to lead you to Bacon.   For instance, Paul Newman's Bacon number is 2.  Paul Newman and Tom Cruise appeared in The Color of Money.  Tom Cruise and Kevin Bacon appeared in A Few Good Men.   It was Paul Newman's face on a bottle of salad dressing that inspired Bacon to think that he could leverage the popularity of this game to popularize good works - and so he established, sixdegrees.org, which is a charitable site.  

The Bible is a book of connections - I would hope that your "Jesus number" would be 1; that you know Him personally and would seek to make Him known to others so that they might come to know Him, too - so often, people can regard the Lord as the person that someone else knows or follows, but they do not enter into a personal relationship with Him.

And, as Kevin Bacon has stressed, the world is really a very small place, and the concept of "six degrees of separation" is maybe more realistic than we might think.   Wikipedia describes it as the  idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of  "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.    Our connections can be viewed as divine appointments, people God has placed in our lives to be companions, maybe even to be brothers or sisters in the Lord, perhaps brought across our path in order that we might share Christ with them, or provide encouragement.  We can pray for these people with whom we're connected.   God uses connections for His glory, and as we are sensitive to how God might use us in someone's life, or vice versa, we become participants in an incredible work that He wishes to do.