A few years ago a newspaper article caught my eye. It suggested that in a vast and lonely Australian desert lay a secret. The story immediately set my imagination alive. I thought of the desert: winds sweeping along the parched soil of the land, kicking particles of dust into the air, tousling the spikey Spinifex shrubs, ruffling the fur of the few animals scavenging for moisture. And then I imagined the secret. Because in this dry desert, an unseen reality lay just beneath its surface:

Water.

Trillions of litres of water.

Around six years ago researchers found an underground basin in Western Australia’s Great Victoria desert. Beneath the red sand, sticks and scrub lay a reservoir holding a potential two trillion kilolitres of slightly saline water. While Perth draws cautiously from its often depleted Mundaring Weir water supply, the basin’s capacity was equivalent to 31,000 Mundaring Weirs. That arid desert may have looked like death from above, but underneath it flowed a river of life.

A giant lake in the desert—what an unexpected surprise. Stories like that remind me that ‘unseen’ does not equal ‘unreal’. I wonder how many trekked across that dusty land oblivious of the life beneath them. I wonder how many still do.

I also wonder how many unseen realities lie beneath the surface of our lives. Most of us have days when we sense a world of vivid colour is out there, but remains shrouded from us. Instead of seeing bright reds and purples we see only pastels. But through a brush with serendipity—the unexpected surprise—the veil lifts for a moment and we glimpse the vibrancy of that other world. And in that moment we sense something bigger than us has been encountered. Perhaps someone bigger than us.

What if coincidences weren’t so coincidental? What if they’d been ‘arranged’ just for us?

What if unseen footprints walked alongside us?

An ancient Hebrew song—a Psalm, Psalm 77 in fact—picks up on such ideas. Speaking about God, it poetically records, “Your path led through the sea… though your footprints were not seen.” The song reflects the experiences of Israelites thousands of years ago who had followed God out of Egyptian captivity—through a Red Sea split in half (if you remember the famous story)—and had been led out of their raging sea of troubles in the process. While their eyes hadn’t seen it in the material sense, this community knew that they had encountered God.

So, I wonder: could life flow right beneath our noses, just like that desert discovery? Could we have encounters with God that we don’t usually recognise as such? Could God be written into the drama of our lives as if played by a secondary character or an extra that we haven’t paid much attention to?

I think so.

Life can feel dry and arid at times. Perhaps we should stop, watch and listen. In that quiet moment we may then hear the One who said all those years ago, “If you’re thirsty, come to me and drink. Then streams of living water will flow from within you.”