I really like how N. T. Wright thinks of heaven and earth as a kind of “interlocking reality.”  Both are important, essential in the way things are made.  And I especially like how Wendell Berry catches something like it in the first poem in his 2006 “Sabbaths” collection.

If there are a “chosen few”

then I am not one of them,

if an “elect,” well then

I have not been elected.


I am one who is knocking

at the door. I am one whose foot

is on the bottom rung.

But I know that Heaven’s

bottom rung is Heaven

though the ladder is standing

on the earth where I work

by day and at night sleep

with my head on a stone.

You can read more of Berry’s “Sabbaths 2006” here.