The Exit Strategy

Why "going to heaven" might be the wrong direction.

Throughout my life I heard a specific kind of spiritual song playing in the background. Maybe you’ve heard something similar: “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” It’s a catchy sentiment, but it carries a heavy side effect. When you believe your real life is somewhere else—in a distant, cloudy “somewhere” called Heaven—it makes your life here on earth feel a bit like a waiting room. It turns the world into a disposable backdrop for a story that hasn’t actually started yet.

The Architecture of Belonging

If we look at the bookends of our story, the narrative isn’t about an escape; it’s about an arrival.

In the beginning, we aren’t created for the clouds. We are crafted from the soil and placed in a garden. We weren’t built as celestial beings who got lost; we were built as earthly beings who were meant to belong. Our design is woven into the rhythms of air, water, and dirt.

And at the end, the vision isn’t us flying away to meet God. It’s God bringing Heaven down to meet us. The promise is that the Divine eventually sets up shop right here, on this ground. If the beginning is a garden and the ending is a city on earth, then the “space between” isn’t a waiting room. It’s the home we were designed to inhabit.

The Cost of Escapism

When we treat the earth like a temporary rental, we stop caring for it.

• Why worry about the climate if the whole thing is going to burn?

• Why fight for justice in a neighborhood that’s “not our home”?

• Why bother building something beautiful or lasting if we’re just “passing through”?

Escapism makes life here feel meaningless. It turns our neighbors into “souls to be saved” rather than people to be loved. It makes our work feel like a distraction from our “real” spiritual duties.

But if the earth is our home—if this is the place where the Divine decided to set up shop—then everything changes.

Learning to Inhabit

What if the most spiritual thing you could do today wasn’t trying to figure out how to leave, but learning how to stay?

Inhabiting the world means believing that what we do here actually matters. It means realizing that a meal shared with a friend, a garden planted in a backyard, or a policy changed to help the vulnerable isn’t “secular” work—it’s home improvement. It’s a way of saying, “I believe this place is worth the effort.”

Let’s stop with our exit strategies and start looking at the ground beneath our feet. We weren’t designed to escape this world; we were designed to steward it.