When Two People Actually Meet
We were made for more than managed moments.
There are moments in a conversation when something shifts.
You’ve felt it. The air is different. What begins as two people exchanging pleasantries turns into something unexpected, alive, genuine, and a little electric. Time seems to move differently. You leave feeling more like yourself than when you walked in.
And then there are the other kinds. Conversations where you said all the right things, smiled at all the right moments, checked every box of social competence, and walked away feeling somehow more alone.
Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist and bestselling author, has a new book coming called VIBE, and it’s based on a simple but powerful idea: connection isn’t about how much time we spend together. It’s about how we spend that time. He discovered that genuine chemistry can happen quickly and that it almost never happens by chance.
He’s right. And I believe he’s onto something much bigger than he may realize.
Some encounters feel holy.
I don’t mean that in a soft, decorative way. I mean it in the most literal sense: there are moments of human connection that feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. A conversation with a stranger on a tough day that leaves you wondering how they knew exactly what you needed to hear. A burst of laughter with someone you barely know that opens something up inside you. A shared silence with another person that somehow communicates everything.
These moments don’t seem like coincidence. They seem like gifts.
The theological tradition I follow, rooted in the idea that God is fundamentally relational and that love is not just something God does but something God is, would say that’s no coincidence. When two people enter into genuine encounter with each other, something sacred is happening. Not metaphorically. Ontologically. We are made for connection the same way we are made to breathe. When it happens fully, we recognize it somewhere beneath conscious thought.
The philosopher Martin Buber dedicated his life to exploring two modes of existence: I-It and I-Thou. In I-It, we relate to others as objects, useful, categorizable, knowable, and manageable. In I-Thou, we meet another as a full subject, irreducible, surprising, and genuinely other. Buber believed that every genuine I-Thou encounter contains, at its core, an encounter with the Eternal Thou. He believed that God is present precisely in the space between people who truly meet.
Recently, I called a close friend. He was sitting in an ER room, awaiting news about his son. I didn’t have answers or the right words. I told him I just needed to hear his voice, and for him to hear mine. Not much more was said. I made sure he knew I was there, and that I could be with him if he needed me. I could hear the pain in his voice. And somewhere in that simple exchange, two friends, a phone call, nothing fixed, something passed between us that felt bigger than the sum of what we said. That was not a managed moment. That was an encounter.
What Grant is studying, in psychological terms, is the conditions that make I-Thou possible. That’s important work. It matters greatly. And yet…
We perform connection more than we receive it.
Here’s the question I keep revisiting: if genuine encounter is a gift, why do we invest so much effort trying to create it?
In a recent article about his new book, Grant described a moment before a live event when his conversation partner did something unexpected. Instead of the usual backstage small talk, exchanging life stories and building rapport through biography, she shifted into something more like play. She created a rhythm of riffing back and forth. She wasn’t managing the relationship; she was opening space for something to happen.
That’s a key distinction. There is a form of “building connection” that is mainly about control, showing the right version of yourself, asking questions that make people feel seen, and acting warm as a social tactic. It can seem like intimacy but rarely is.
Genuine connection requires a kind of surrender. Not passivity. Grant’s conversation partner was actively shaping the conversation, ready to be surprised, to follow rather than lead, to let the conversation evolve into something neither person planned. It calls for, in a word, vulnerability. Not vulnerability as confession or emotional download, but vulnerability as openness: I don’t know exactly where this is headed, and I’m willing to find out.
You can optimize for impression but never truly be understood.
Faith communities are often the worst offenders.
This is the hardest part to say, but it’s important enough to speak plainly.
Churches, and I speak as a pastor who loves the church, are often better at hosting community than truly practicing it. We hold coffee hours, small groups, potluck dinners, and welcome teams. We have systems for connecting people. Yet, beneath all of this, there is often a strong, unspoken message: if you act the right way, you’ll belong here.
That’s not belonging. Beneath that message lies fear, and fear, not malice, is usually what turns belonging into audition.
When connection depends on presentation, on how well you perform wellness, orthodoxy, optimism, or whatever the local culture values, it isn’t genuine. True connection requires the possibility of being seen as you really are, not as you have arranged yourself to seem.
The irony is that the core of the Christian story is completely anti-performance. Grace, unearned, undeserved, given before you’ve proven yourself worthy, is the fundamental act. You don’t earn your way into belonging. You’re already part of it. The invitation is simply to show up as you are.
A community genuinely shaped by grace wouldn’t require people to perform. It would be one of the rare places in modern life where performance isn’t necessary, where something authentic could happen between people, and where the room might truly come alive.
So what does this ask of us?
Grant suggests we can learn to create conditions for genuine connection. I believe that. The spiritual tradition also teaches: we can learn to receive it, to stay open, resist the urge to manage every encounter, and trust that something bigger than what either person brings to the table might happen between two people.
In practice, this might mean asking an actual question instead of a polite one. Pausing in silence a little longer than feels comfortable. Allowing yourself to be surprised by someone you thought you understood. Taking a small risk with honesty when politeness would be safer.
It might look like building communities, families, friendships, or congregations, where the unspoken rule isn’t to perform well but to show up authentically.
And it might mean paying attention when a conversation feels alive, when time seems to move differently, when you walk away feeling more like yourself. Not just a psychological curiosity, but a signpost—something trying to tell you what you were made for.
That moment when something shifts between two people, it might be one of the ways love announces itself.
Hearing Beyond the Noise is for people who haven’t given up on faith, just on the versions of it that no longer make sense. For those inside the church, outside of it, and everyone standing in the doorway. If this resonated, share it with someone who would find it worth reading.