I've Been Thinking About This…

Do you have a garden hose? But you know what one looks like, right? So there were two ants – their names were Bert and Ernie – and they were walking along the garden hose on the inside. Now ants don’t need a lot of light, which is a good thing, because there wasn’t a whole lot of light in there! And ants aren’t looking for any change in their surroundings – which is another good thing, because it was pretty steady work. In fact, if you think about it, from their perspective everything can be measured in 2 dimensions – the distance around the pipe and the length of it (they can’t even tell that it bends, they’re so small and blind).

If this was a ritzy kind of garden hose, where you could see in but they couldn’t see out (sort of a one-way mirror thing), we could see them plodding on and on round the coils. But now let’s get vandalous and cut a hole in the hosepipe, right where Bert is about to walk. (They’re walking side by side.) So Bert and Ernie walk on, and suddenly Bert finds himself turned around on the outside while Ernie continues forward on the inside.

Ants aren’t the brightest of creatures, and I expect Ernie has been chatting away: “I say this is a jolly long hosepipe Bert isn’t it Have you ever been in such a long hosepipe Bert I sure haven’t and it’s really really dark Bert I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a long dark hosepipe before old chap have you Bert Of course we wouldn’t remember even if we had ‘coz we’re ants and we don’t ‘coz we’re not the brightest of creatures but …” and the sound of his little ant voice trailed off into the dark. Meanwhile, Bert has taken several dozen steps before he notices anything different, but then he stops and looks around.

And he sees that he is in a very different place. For one thing, he can see. This is new. And what he sees is that he is in a place that has more than just circumference and distance. This is a proper ‘up’ and ‘down’, and the ‘up’ bit is vast. It also has a left and right, and a front and back (although he has to turn around for that).

He also sees that he is standing on the hosepipe they had been walking through. And because I set it up with a clever bit of writer’s prescience earlier in the story, he finds that he can see into the hosepipe. When he looks a little up and to the left, he can see Ernie, apparently unaware that Bert had fallen out of the tube somehow because the dear old chap is still chatting away (Bert can see his mouth moving). And Ernie plods along and moves off to Bert’s right. And Bert waits for a while, and Ernie doesn’t come back from the right … he shows up from Bert’s left instead, and on the next higher piece of hosepipe, which is a bit puzzling.

And Bert waits some more, and … yes, there’s Ernie again, on the next higher piece still, coming in from the left again. And Bert tries to tell Ernie (if he’d only stop talking!) that all Ernie has to do is go up instead of forward all the time, and he could skip the loop and get to the next one in 2 seconds flat … and then Bert realizes that (1) he has no words to tell Ernie what to do, (2) Ernie (who had long forgotten the outside of the hosepipe) would havw no concept of what Bert is talking about, and (3) Ernie has no way to break out of one part of his universe to get into another.

Which brings us to John the Revelator. John was ‘caught up in the spirit’, in the book of Revelation, and saw things in the spirit that were absolutely incredible … amazing … different. He was given the gift of understanding some of what he saw, but how do you leave the closeted dimensions of our universe, see the realness of Heaven and then go back and describe it to people who have no words for the things you saw? Can you describe snow to a Saharan? So he used images that we could understand.

Even Jesus, who as Man was on Earth for 33 years and as God was in Heaven for quite a bit longer(!), used images – “The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed-leaven-treasure-a merchant-a net-a master…” (Matt 13:31,33,44,45,47; Matt 20:1)

What images come to mind as you think of Heaven? Are there parables you’ve used to help describe part of the Bible?

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