The gate of heaven
Jacob at Bethel
Jacob is a man caught exactly between two lives. He has fled the home he cheated his way out of and has not yet reached the place he is running toward; he is nobody's, nowhere, asleep on the open ground with a stone for a pillow. It is the perfect picture of what later writers would name liminal space — the threshold between what was and what is not yet, the disorienting gap that Victor Turner and Richard Rohr both observed is where the deepest transformation tends to happen. Jacob would have rushed straight through it if he could.
And it is there, in the very gap he wants only to get past, that heaven opens. A ladder, angels ascending and descending, and the LORD Himself standing above it with a promise. Jacob wakes shaken, astonished that God had been in a place he had written off as empty transit: surely the LORD was in this place, and he did not know it. The nothing-place, the in-between he was sleeping through, turns out to be the house of God and the gate of heaven. He had been camping at the threshold of the holy and had nearly missed it.
“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I didn't know it.”
— Jacob, at Bethel — Genesis 28:16 (WEB)
“How dreadful is this place! This is none other than God's house, and this is the gate of heaven.”
This is disorientation — the liminal middle, the threshold between what was and what is not yet, and the holiness hidden inside it. What it asks is presence: not to numb or sprint through the in-between, but to stay awake in it, on the chance that the nowhere you are crossing is the gate of heaven.
The gap between the old life and the new one — after the break, before the arrival — feels like wasted time, dead miles to be endured and forgotten, a waiting room with no magazines. So we sleep through it, or we numb it, or we throw all our energy at getting it over with, certain that nothing of value could possibly be happening in a place this formless and exposed. But Bethel says otherwise.
The threshold was exactly where Jacob met God, not back in the home he left, not ahead in the land he was promised, but there, in the disorienting middle he could not wait to escape. The in-between is not dead time to be survived; it can be the holiest ground you will ever stand on, the gate of heaven disguised as a nowhere with a stone for a pillow. So before you sleep through your wilderness or sprint to its exit, look around. The LORD may be in this very place you cannot wait to leave, and you do not yet know it.
The whole Church now stands in a kind of liminal space, no longer what it was in the age of Christendom, not yet whatever it is becoming. Across the West and beyond, the Body finds itself caught in the open, stranded between an authority that has cracked and a new shape not yet formed, exposed before a watching world. It is tempting to read the in-between as mere decline, dead time to grit through until something solid returns. But Bethel reframes the stranding. The threshold is holy ground, the very house of God and gate of heaven. The disorienting middle of the Church's great rummage sale is not God's absence from His people; it can be the place of encounter, where the LORD is present in the gap itself.
The LORD standing over the ladder, present in the place that looked empty. What cannot be shaken is His presence in the gap itself — not only in the home behind or the land ahead, but here, in the disorienting middle, the gate of heaven you were about to sleep through.
- Where am I rushing through an in-between, certain nothing of value could be happening there?
- What might I be sleeping through that is actually the gate of heaven?
- Can I stay awake to the holiness of the threshold I cannot wait to leave?
Lord, I want only to be through this in-between, to skip the disorienting middle and reach the other side. But You met Jacob at the threshold. Keep me awake in mine. Let me find that You are in this very place I cannot wait to leave, even when I do not yet know it. Amen.