Acts 17:28 Meaning For in Him We Live

You do not have life. You are life, arising within a vast aliveness that holds you the way the ocean holds a wave. Every breath, every movement, every quiet sense of I am happens inside that one presence, and you have never been separate from it.

The mind searches for the sacred somewhere far off, out beyond the sky. But the ground of your being is nearer than your next thought. Because you live and move within this presence rather than apart from it, there is nowhere you must travel to find what you already are.

The him in whom everyone lives and moves is not a figure seated somewhere above the world. It is human imagination, the awareness of being that carries every person through the day. Nothing you feel, plan, or do happens outside of it. This is the unknown God the Athenians worshipped without recognizing, because they credited statues and outer causes instead of the power looking out through their own eyes.

To be his offspring means the same power that made the world is the power now imagining as you. No gap stands between the maker and the one who feels himself alive. Whatever a man assumes and feels to be so, that imagining brings into being, for the creator has become the creature. The self that seems small and hidden is the substance of everything a person sees.

A fish does not search for the sea; it swims in what already surrounds and sustains it. Every breath, every step, the bare fact of existing is drawn from a nearness closer than one's own pulse. The fault this exposes is the long search outward for a God imagined to be elsewhere, while the seeker is already immersed in what is sought.

The cure is to grow still and recognize the water one has been swimming in all along. God is present not as a distant maker but as the living medium in which a person lives and moves.