The Grain of the Universe

I was watching a basketball game a while back — Virginia, coached by Tony Bennett — and something about it felt different. The game was slow. Deliberate. Nobody was trying to be the hero. Players passed the ball, set screens, and played slowly. 

It wasn’t flashy. It was almost meditative - and they kept winning.

Bennett won a national championship in 2019. But the year before, his team suffered one of the most humiliating losses in the history of the sport — the first number-one seed ever to lose to a sixteenth seed. He could have panicked. Changed his system. Started chasing five-star recruits. He didn’t. He came back the next year and won it all, doing the exact same boring things.

What held the program together wasn’t strategy. It was something Bennett called the Five Pillars: Humility, Passion, Unity, Servanthood, Thankfulness.

Those pillars didn’t come from a leadership seminar. They came from Bennett’s father.

Dick Bennett was a basketball coach for nearly three decades. He was also a Christian man with a deep faith that led him to read Scripture daily and to consider the Apostle Paul his hero. Somewhere in the middle of his career, Dick started asking a question that changed everything: What did Jesus actually model?

Here’s how Dick described it: Jesus was humble in every way you could imagine. He was passionate to the death. He took twelve average guys, unified them, taught them to serve one another, and changed the course of history.

That’s where the pillars came from. Not a whiteboard brainstorm. A man watching Jesus and writing down what he saw.

When Dick moved to the University of Wisconsin and built a new practice facility, he had the pillars printed on a laminated card, gathered his players around, and buried it in the concrete under center court. Literally in the foundation.

I’ve been thinking about why that image won’t leave me alone.

It’s because the pillars work. Not just in basketball. Dave Roberts, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has won three World Series with a completely different approach — not slow and grinding, but orchestrating a roster of superstars into an unselfish unit. His philosophy sounds like Bennett’s translated into a different language: trust over control, belief in others over self-promotion. He told his players after one championship, “You guys made it easy for me to believe in you.”

Two sports. Two very different rosters. Same conviction: a community of character produces sustainable excellence.

But here’s the question I keep coming back to: Why does this work?

The airport bookstore answer is that teamwork is effective. Fine. But that only tells you that it works, not why. The biblical answer goes deeper. It starts with the shape of the whole story - the grain of the universe. 

God creates human beings for life together — not as isolated performers, but as a community reflecting the fellowship that already exists within God Himself. Father, Son, and Spirit, eternally giving glory to one another. The Fall shatters that design into rivalry. The whole Old Testament traces what happens when people pursue their own glory at the expense of the body.

The Wisdom Literature names it plainly. “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed” is not a management tip. It’s a description of how God designed human beings to function. The fool in Proverbs is the one who trusts his own heart. The wise person listens, submits, considers others.

Then Jesus says the quiet part out loud: “The greatest among you shall be your servant.” He washes feet. He builds His kingdom with fishermen and tax collectors — the walk-ons nobody else recruited. It's anachronistic to say Jesus is running Dick Bennett’s system. But you can begin to see what Bennett learned. You win and sustain excellence with character, not star power. 

That's what I call going with the grain of the universe.

Paul further describes it in 1 Corinthians 12. In speaking of the Body of Christ he tells us that the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” The weaker parts are indispensable. This is so much more than a metaphor for teamwork. It is the shape of reality.

Now — someone might fairly push back. “You don’t need to be a Christian to build a great team. Plenty of non-religious coaches win championships through discipline and unselfishness.”

That’s true. What we sometimes call "common grace" is real. Rain doesn't only fall on Christians. God’s created order persists even where it isn’t acknowledged. An atheist can coach an unselfish team.

But there’s a difference between borrowing the fruit and owning the root system.

In a universe without a God who is, in His very nature, self-giving love — Father, Son, and Spirit in eternal communion — selflessness is a useful strategy. A cut flower. Lovely for a season, dying at the stem. The Christian faith is the only worldview where self-giving love is not a tactic but the nature of being itself. Before creation, God was already a community of persons giving glory away.

When Dick Bennett studied Jesus and saw humility, passion, unity, servanthood, and thankfulness, he wasn’t inventing principles. He was discovering the grain of the universe — the way things actually work when they work the way God intended.

Philippians 2 says Christ did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself and took the form of a servant. That self-emptying is not just how we were saved. It is the pattern underneath all true flourishing. It’s the wisdom of God that looks like foolishness to the world.

The boring things win. Faithfulness wins. Passing the ball wins. Not because it’s a clever strategy, but because that’s the grain of the universe made by God, who has been giving glory away for all eternity.