I think heaven is closer than I was told

I grew up with a map. Heaven was up, hell was down, and this life was the waiting room where you found out which one you had earned. Nobody ever said it that plainly, but that was the shape of it, and I carried it for a long time without ever turning it over to look at the back.

I have been turning it over lately.

What started it was not an argument or a book that talked me out of anything. It was noticing that the parts of my faith that had survived were the parts nobody had built a building around. The Sermon on the Mount survived. Love your enemies survived. The bit where he says the kingdom is not going to arrive with people pointing at it survived. What did not survive was almost everything that had been added on top: the rituals, the traditions, the certainty about things nobody can be certain about, the sense that the institution was the point and I was there to support it.

So here is where I have landed, for now, and I want to say it out loud somewhere.

I do not think heaven and hell are places you get shipped to. I think they are states you are already in and out of, and that most of us move between them several times a week. I have been in hell in my own kitchen. I have been in something I would call heaven in a parking lot. Whatever else is or is not true after we die, that part I am fairly sure about, because I have been in both rooms.

I know the verse people quote at this. I also know it is one of the most argued-over sentences in the New Testament, and that the honest answer is that it will not settle the question either way. I am not going to pretend the Greek is on my side when it is genuinely contested. But the idea does not live or die on one verse. Paul says God's Spirit lives in you. John has him saying we will come and make our home with you. Make our home. Not come and collect you later.

The other thing I keep coming back to is what the first followers were called. Before anyone said Christian, the book of Acts just calls them the Way. Not the belief, not the institution, not the correct set of answers. The road. Something you walk. They met in houses. They ate together. There were no buildings for two hundred years. Whatever that thing was, I think I would have liked it, and I do not think I would recognise most of what came after it.

I read outside my own tradition now, and I have stopped apologising for that. The Stoics know things. The Buddhists know things about the mind that took the West another eighteen hundred years to catch up to. I do not think that makes me less of anything. If God is real then God did not confine himself to the shelf I happened to be born next to.

I have heard the word for this: Christian agnostic. Somebody believing in God, and honest enough to say he does not know the rest. When I first heard it I felt caught out, in a good way. That is the one. Not a man who has left. A man who is still here and cannot say some of the lines.

So that is where I am. I am not trying to talk anyone out of their church. If yours is good to you, keep it, and I mean that. I am also not looking for someone to tell me I am right.

What I am actually looking for is other people who are somewhere near here, so I can stop having this conversation only in my own head.

If that is you, what did you keep?