Deep down we all want to believe that life exists on a straight horizontal line. If you don't believe me consider the fact that for way longer than we’re comfortable with, humanity thought we were all hanging on a pancake in space. Or rather, that everything in the universe revolved around that pancake. Thank God we got over that, right?
Well we did… in a scientific sense. In terms of how we view planets now and our ability to actually leave the planet and explore, the myth that you could somehow sail your boat off the edge of the Earth is pretty much dead*
*There’s always someone out there…
Unfortunately, we religious people still haven't been able to shake this view when it comes to things outside the shape of our planet. Consider the shape of our lives for instance. There's this underlying, sneaky, flat narrative that includes our careers, relationships, what clothes we wear and what photos we share. It’s the way we approach money and security. There’s a finite bit of resources and we need to scoop up as much as we can.
This is life on the straight, flat, horizontal line. What I’ll call horizontal living.
Horizontal living is all about conquering what's around you. Similar to how we acted when we believed we could sail off the map in our viking boat, horizontal living is making a place for yourself in the world where you come out victorious.
But the truth is that's not the only way. If something can go side to side then it must be true that it can go up and down.
There's this wonderful other way of life that I'm going to call the vertical living. Where the point of our lives may just be to seek wisdom from the God that created us and believe with all our hearts that we're forgiven and wanted. Sounds amazing at first… but here’s the trick. A lot of Christianity seems to think living vertically is the only thing we should be striving for.
That’s not the whole of life. In that scenario we’re only looking out for ourselves again.
For a good life to take shape, like say, the shape of the planet we’re spinning on. It must include the horizontal and the vertical. This is where Christianity often falls flat.
There's this beautiful story in the Old Testament called the Tower of Babel.
In it, a group of very early humans decide they have had enough of normal living. They want to be like God and among God. So they start to build a giant tower (as one does).
The story gets kind of weird from here, as God decides to thwart the plans of these people by scattering them all about, and giving them new languages so that they can’t understand each other. I know, kind of cruel right?
New languages meant the formation of dozens of new tribes and ways of living.However, language isn’t the only thing God shakes up. The word for language is really interesting in the Hebrew that this story was written in.
This word for language is called Saphah, and It can mean language. It can also mean lip, shore, edge, or most interestingly… it can mean border.
New languages would have meant the formation of dozens of new tribes and ways of living. New borders, new people dependent on just a few who shared that new language to make something brand new. This meant building their own cultures, songs, stories and identities. They weren't able to be the same anymore, they had to learn to live in the ways that they differ. They had to learn to be different.
They found a little bit more of who God is, as a result of how they had been scattered. They were transformed and beautifully different. Showing the diversity God has in mind.
They weren't able to remain uniform anymore. They had to learn to live in the ways that they differ.
I'm going to say something controversial here… I believe these early humans actually got what they wanted.
God's response in separating them into new borders and tongues was a way of asking, “Why are you trying to escape this place I’ve made for you? Don't you see that this is what it's all about? The here and the now. This is why you were made. Now I'm going to scatter you for your own good so you stop focusing on your projects and start focusing on each other. You want to be like me? Speak different languages. Form different paths, embrace your difference.”
That's what it looks like when the vertical way of life comes crashing down on the horizontal way of life. That's the only way to live. The bricks of wisdom and love for God that we build up are always supposed to collide with the standard horizontal notions of money, career and family.
In our world… Where the horizontal meets the vertical is called the horizon. It’s where our eyes stop working and we can’t see beyond that line way out in the distance. A border that can only be chased. It’s that sort of life we’re called into if we want to follow Jesus. Where we think we have it all figured out and that line, that border if you will, keeps moving on in the distance.
It’s a journey. It’s best lived with all our differences and beauty colliding together. I hope we can be brave, embrace the collision and begin walking towards that ever moving border. That’s what it means to believe the Earth isn’t flat anymore. It’s to believe that maybe the different people that scare you the most might just be exactly what God intended for when he scattered us. It’s to embrace everyone with the knowledge that we can’t steer the ship off the map anymore, we can only keep discovering what’s new.