A friend of mine was worried about his grandmother because she was living alone in their old family house in Mississippi. He called her and told her of his concern. She was in her favorite chair on the porch and chided him, saying, “Don’t worry; I’m not alone. It’s just me and ol’ JC out here rockin’.” For this woman, being “raised with Christ” wasn’t some abstraction or vague liturgical phrase. It was a real and lived experience. Jesus was with her on the porch, her mind was set on things of Christ, and this gave her comfort. It was enough.

The beginning of this third chapter of Colossians uses the imagery from the three-storied universe cosmology: Heaven is above, Earth is in the middle, and Hell or Sheol is below. Today we know this isn’t how the universe is constructed, but we can understand this image as a way of describing what is still true of God: God is invisible to us and non-material.

Jesus often talked about the kingdom of God being close by, drawing the attention of the disciples to a non-material reality that is always with us, even as it is unseen. This is the realm of the eternal, of the resurrected Christ. Our spiritual life trains our awareness such that we become grounded in that world rather than the material, ephemeral reality in which our physical body resides.

When my friend’s grandmother said that JC was on the porch with her, she didn’t mean that a material body was present but rather that she was attuned to the non-material presence of the Divine. From that vantage point, God is always enough.