Image by Grok
Stairway to Heaven
Genesis 28:10 — "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it."
I've been thinking lately about dimensions — not just the ones physicists sketch on chalkboards, but the ones we live in without noticing. In school, they taught us about a four‑dimensional universe: length, width, height, and time woven together like threads in a cosmic loom. But the more I ponder it, the more I suspect these four dimensions are only the ground floor of a much larger house.
We begin life in something like a one‑dimensional line. As infants, our world is nothing but the next need, the next cry, the next comfort. Forward and backward. Hunger and fullness. Light and dark. A single line of experience with no depth.
Then we grow, and the world widens. We step into a second dimension — relationships, emotions, and memory. Suddenly, life has a sideways motion. We can turn. We can choose. We can love, and our hearts can be wounded.
Then comes the third dimension, the world of bodies and work and responsibility. We learn to inhabit space. We build, repair, plant, raise, and bury. We discover that life has height and depth, not just length and width. We climb the highest mountains and descend into the lowest valleys — literal and spiritual. We learn that joy and sorrow are not opposites but elevations in the same landscape.
Even as a boy, I felt the pull of those higher dimensions without having words for them. I climbed every tree I could find, not to conquer it but to sit inside the mystery and beauty of the thing itself. I would run my hands along the bark, breathe in the scent of the leaves, and revel in the secret joy of hiding from the world while almost touching the sky. There were times at night, when I would climb up into the leafy cover of a tall tree, finally emerging into the light of a full moon, feeling that ancient thrill — the danger, the freedom, the quiet confidence in my young strength. I didn't know it then, but those moments were my first steps upward, the earliest rungs on the ladder Jacob saw in his dream.
Time, the fourth dimension, sweeps us along whether we want it to or not. We live in the moment, remember the moments past, and imagine the moments ahead. But the future is not ours until it collapses into the present. We are creatures who move through time like fish through water, unaware of the medium that carries us.
But what if these four dimensions are only the first flight of stairs?
What if spiritual life is not an escape from the physical world but an ascent into higher dimensions of reality — levels of being that make our current existence look as flat as a pencil sketch compared to an actual mountain sunrise?
I imagine it like this: each dimension is a step upward, a rung on a ladder, a widening of the soul's field of vision. We climb the staircase of awareness, relationship, and embodiment through time and space. And in time, we find meaning through love and faith — then the glory that God alone knows.
If a one‑dimensional creature cannot imagine a cube, and a two‑dimensional creature cannot imagine a sphere, why should we expect to grasp the dimensionality of God? Whatever realm He inhabits is not merely higher — it is categorically different. It is the place where past, present, and future are one "eternal now," where light is not a wave or particle but a Person, where truth is not a proposition but a Presence.
Maybe that's why the fireflies of the quantum world fascinate me so much. They flicker in and out of existence like tiny messengers from a higher floor of the house. They hint that reality is deeper than our senses can grasp. They whisper that creation is not a machine but a mystery, not a closed system but a staircase.
And maybe that's why Jesus speaks so often of "coming up," "being lifted," "ascending," "being born again." He isn't offering us an escape hatch from the world. He's offering us the next dimension. A higher step. A wider view. A deeper reality.
We began on the ground floor, crawling along a single line. We are now somewhere in the middle, climbing through time and space. And we are being drawn upward still — toward the dimension where God is not inferred but encountered, not glimpsed but seen.
The line from 1 John 3:2 — "We know not what we shall be" — describes the uncertainty about what believers will become when Christ returns. We are now children of God, but our real identity will be revealed when we stand in His presence. Yet we may be sure we shall be more, not less — more dimensional, more real, more alive.
The fireflies flicker. The candle burns through the night, waiting for the sunrise. And the staircase beckons us upward to eternal glory.
Amen
