If we follow the history of the universe back into time, the scale of the universe decreases rapidly. By 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the separations between galaxies was only ( 300,000/15 billion years)^2/3 or 0.0007 what it is now. The galaxies we see 90 degrees apart at a distance of say 14 billion light years, were only about 14,000 x 0.0007 = 19 million light years apart. At a time 1 year after the Big Bang, they were only 19 million x ( 1 / 300000)^1/2 = 34,000 light years apart. And by 1 second, they were 6 light years apart. The light, and the light paths taken during this journey have been stretched and gravitationally bent by a factor of 15 billion/6 nearly 3 billion times during the journey to us. In terns of the Big Bang, the matter in these distant galaxies was actually closer together than the distance between your eyes and the TV screen you are now staring at, at one time in the remote past. Gravitational lensing has now given us the illusion that these galaxies have always been very far apart in the universe.