As Above — So Below?

Lately, I seem to keep having versions of the same conversation.

With family. With friends.
With recruiters. With my church community.
Sometimes with myself.

The words change, but the question underneath them is usually some version of:

What exactly are you doing with your life?

Seminary or finance?
Ministry or work?
DoorDash or a career?

What happens to one if you choose the other?
Do you actually know where you are going?

Recently, a friend asked it particularly plainly.

Am I a seminarian or a DoorDash driver?
What happens if I find a full-time job?
Do I have clarity about what I am doing?

Fair questions. And strangely, I realized I had an answer.

Seminary is still there. I am enrolled for the fall. I have enough flexibility to move through it quickly or slowly depending on what life requires. The scholarship gives me room to do that.

And I think I know what I am becoming.

For years, people have asked some version of another familiar question:

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I think I finally know.

What surprised me was realizing that I do not have to become it immediately.

I still have time to grow into that grown-up life.

For now, I need work.

Not because I have abandoned the future.
Because I need to survive the present long enough to reach it.

That was when the conversation became something else.

I told my friend:

I’ve received the Grace of the God above to keep enduring life. Now I’m searching for the grace of a god below who can help me keep surviving it.

I meant it partly as humor. But after I sent it, the words stayed with me.

The God above.
A god below.

And somewhere in that distinction, an old phrase came back to me.

As above, so below.

I have heard the phrase many times.

Usually as some expression of correspondence.
What is above is somehow reflected below.

The heavenly and the earthly.
The spiritual and the material.
The unseen and the seen.

But suddenly I found myself wondering:

Is it?

Because above — at least in the God I have slowly come to know — life seems to begin with gift.

Before achievement. Before productivity. Before usefulness.
Before anyone proves anything.

The sun rises.
Rain falls.
Breath comes.
A child arrives without first earning the right to exist.

Creation seems to begin with abundance.

With provision.
With gift.
With grace.

And then we come down here.

Below, almost everything required to remain alive has a price.

Food. Shelter. Medicine.
Transportation. Education. Rest.
Time.

Even the freedom to sit quietly and discern what your life might be for depends, in some way, on whether the rent gets paid.

Perhaps that is what unsettles me.

We proclaim a God of unearned grace while living inside systems that make nearly every condition of survival something that must continually be earned.

As above — so below?

I am not sure.

Above, life is given.
Below, life is invoiced.

Above, creation does not appear to ask whether the tree deserves sunlight.
Below, we ask whether the person deserves assistance.

Above, the birds do not submit résumés before finding something to eat.
Below, a human being can have decades of experience, gifts to offer, people who depend on them, a sense of vocation, and a willingness to work — and still spend the day wondering whether enough deliveries will come through to keep life moving.

Perhaps that is why Jesus’ words about birds and lilies have always sounded so beautiful.

And perhaps why they can sound almost impossible.

Consider the birds.
Consider the lilies.
Do not worry about tomorrow.

And yet most of us inhabit a world in which not worrying about tomorrow would be considered financially irresponsible.

So what happened between the lilies and us?

Maybe the problem was never that God stopped providing.
Maybe we became part of the means through which provision was supposed to circulate.

There is enough food.
Enough intelligence. Enough labor.
Enough human capacity. Enough wealth.

Enough of almost everything.

And yet abundance can sit beside deprivation without either one disturbing the other very much.

Which makes me wonder whether the distance between above and below is less a theological mystery than a human construction.

Maybe heaven was never supposed to descend fully formed. Maybe we were supposed to participate in making the below resemble what we say we have encountered above.

Grace becoming hospitality.
Abundance becoming generosity.
Mercy becoming policy.
Love becoming economics.
Provision becoming neighborliness.
Gift becoming circulation.

But somewhere along the way, another god became extraordinarily powerful below.

Money.

Not necessarily because we consciously worship it.
Most of us would deny that immediately.

But look at the authority we have given it.

Money can determine where you sleep.

What you eat.
Whether you receive medical care.
How much time you spend with your children.

Whether you can study.
Whether you can rest.
Whether you can leave.
Whether you can pursue work that matters.

Sometimes, whether you can survive long enough to discover what your life is becoming.

That is an astonishing amount of authority to give anything.

Perhaps that is why my accidental phrase stayed with me.

A God above and a god below.

Because there should not need to be two.

If what we believe about the God above is true, then perhaps the work of human life is not merely believing in that grace.

Perhaps it is learning how to embody it.

To become its earthly evidence.
To make the distance between above and below a little smaller.

Maybe that is part of vocation too.

Not escaping the world below in search of something above.
But allowing what we have glimpsed above to take flesh here.

In a meal.

A paycheck. A home.
A second chance.
A fair wage.

A patient landlord.
A job offered at the right moment.
A friend who asks how you are doing and stays long enough to hear the answer.
A community that refuses to let someone disappear simply because their bank account reached zero.

Grace with an address.
Grace with hands.
Grace that can pay the electric bill.

And perhaps that is the lament underneath all those conversations.

Seminary or finance?
Ministry or work?

What are you becoming?
What are you doing now?

I am beginning to think those may not be competing questions at all.

I know something about the life I am growing toward. What I am searching for now is enough life below to reach it.

Not because heaven has failed.

But because we have seen something beautiful above and still seem unable — or unwilling — to organize life below in its image.

So I return to the old phrase, only now with a question mark.

As above — so below?

Not a declaration.
A question.

Maybe even a prayer.

May the grace we claim to have discovered above someday become the way we choose to live with one another below.