Several years ago, I was riding my bike along a bike path in Tucson, AZ, where I was living at the time. I had been riding for quite some time, and pulled off the path for a moment to rest. As I looked down, I saw a beetle by my front tire, ambling along without a care in the world. 

This beetle interested me, and I bent over the handlebars to get a better look. At that moment, the strangest thing happened. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie. I saw a line from the beetle up into the sky – a very specific point in the sky. And I noticed that there were other little insects that had lines from them up into the sky, and the birds flying overhead did too. As people rode by or ran by on the bike path, each of them had a line that went from their heads, up to the same point in the sky, and which followed them around the curves and up and down the small elevations in the path, complete with numbers indicating distance, speed and direction. It really was like a strange sci-fi vision in my head.

And all of this was accompanied by the strangest feeling of connectedness, of interdependence, and of my own integration with all living things. 

It was a beautiful moment, and one I remember vividly.

As I reflected on this moment, several things popped into my head. The first was from the Apostle Paul. In his sermon on the Areopagus in Athens, he quotes from Greek poets when speaking to the philosophers about an Unknown God. 

²⁶ From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷ so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸ For ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’ – Acts 17:26-28

In him we live and move and have our being. Everything I saw at that moment was tied to the same point in the sky, and that attachment to each creature, every person, bird, and insect showed that their very being was inextricably bound to God. We have come from God, and to God we shall return. Our very existence is a gift from God, and our continued day to day lives only move forward because God keeps the force of life in us – and God keeps the force of life in all other creatures too.

The second thing that came to me was the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?¹

Having an image of the beetles, the birds, all the insects and the people running, walking, and biking on this path connected to a point in the sky just reinforced this idea that God pays attention to everything and everyone. God is just as concerned about the kings and queens of this world as He is about the flies that lay their eggs in the dung heaps. God is just as concerned about the maggot that crawls out of the dung heap as He is concerned about the horse that swats the fly with its tail. Each of them, in my vision, would have a line from them to the sky, complete with distance, speed and direction. Are they not created by, and connected to God too? How then can I not see God in the dung heap? How can I not also see God in the putrid or the unpleasant? 

And, while I might be able to see the beauty of God in even the most disgusting dung heap that is still teeming with life, it becomes a whole lot harder to see the connectedness of God when I turn my mind to other people – other human beings. As is normally the case when I see the hand of God so clearly, I am confronted with my own inability to detach my own personal vendettas, my selfish ambitions and my judgments of others. I began to think of the fact that even people whom I might consider maggots festering in a dung heap are still connected to God, and in Him, find their being and the force of life. 

Look at the birds of the air … are you not of more value than they?

While this says, “Aren’t you more valuable than the birds of the air?” it also implies the opposite – that we are not more important than the birds; that all life is sacred to God, and that God cares for all things. God knows the number of the hair on your head, and God knows the hairs on the legs of a fly sitting on a pile of dung, laying eggs. And if all living things are loved by God, then how can I look at this person who has brought the dung heap to my metaphorical doorstep, living room, or my own life, and not see that God is asking me, “Are you of more value than they?”

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, the educated brother, says “The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.” Ivan is Dostoevsky’s characterization of secular humanism, a philosophy that seeks eagerly to proclaim love for the generalized humanity that it often finds disgusting when confronted with it on the personal level. Where Ivan pursued the ideal, his brother Alyosha pursued the downright impossible activity of trying to truly love his neighbors and the rest of humanity with childlike compassion. That compassion may have been pure in intention, but it was often misunderstood by those he was trying to help, because the world is messy and often corrupt, and people are often more likely to distrust a person than to trust.

In Him we live and move and have our being. And that includes the messy and the corrupt, and it includes those who I look at and judge, and who I cannot help but see as maggots in a dung heap. I can state the ideal that I strive for, but I often fail to live up to it when confronted with the reality of the particular.

Finding God in the dung heap doesn’t just mean I see the interconnectedness of all things, but that I see that God is above all, God is through all, and especially that God is in all. 

God is in me. God is in the flies in the dung heap. God is in those I love. And, more importantly, God is in those whom I can only pretend to love – or love in the most generic and general of ways.

God is in me. And God is in all.

I prefer to see and understand and remember this concept in sci-fi visions of beetles and birds connected to an eternal presence. Instead, I am confronted to remember it even when I am faced with the angry, the belligerent, or the downright evil and corrupt. I am confronted to find it in the people who bring the metaphorical dung heap to my feet. Because they too are connected to God.

1. Matthew 6:26 ↩︎