Perhaps if you’re like me you’ve been drawn into the popular Netflix show Stranger Things. It can be suspenseful at times, but I love the characters at the center of the story. (I got into trouble for recommending it to my spouse who doesn’t like scary shows. I described it as “other-worldly,” which made her think it was going to be like Narnia or Lord of the Rings. But it’s more like Stephen King than J.R.R. Tolkien.)

I don’t think it’s giving too much away (consider this your spoiler alert!) to say the young characters in the series encounter an alternate dimension called the Upside Down. The Upside Down is like a mirror version of our world. It shares the same locations and infrastructure of this world, but is full of decay, darkness, and monsters.

In a recent episode, one of the characters who has been to and returned from the Upside Down starts to have apparent flashbacks. He likens his flashback experiences as being similar to being stuck between frames of a View-Master. (If you lived in the 1980s or 90s, perhaps you remember those orange View-Masters that would allow you to click through tiny pictures.) In one frame, he sees our world. In the other frame, he sees the Upside Down. It’s like he’s stuck between these two frames.

Strangely, this in-betweenness reminds me of what it’s like to be a Christian. There’s an in-betweenness in the life of faith that is hard to describe.

The Bible speaks of the in-betweenness of the Christian life in a few different ways. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:11 refers to Christians as those “on whom the end of the ages has come” (NRSV). One age is ending, another is beginning, and Christians live where the two overlap. Pastor Mary Albing, a mentor of mine, put the same idea in spatial terms: Christians live with one foot on earth and another in heaven. It’s like we are stuck between two frames: in one frame is a weary world and in the other is a new creation.

Birth metaphors are also used to describe this in-betweenness for individuals, communities, and all of creation. In Romans 8:22-23, Paul writes, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; not only creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” We are living in the in-between time of labor before a new birth.

We are also called ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20) – who experience the in-betweenness of being a representative of a distant land. Like the characters in Stranger Things, Christians enter the world as representatives of a different reality, an alternate dimension.

Faith, in many ways, is about having a new vision of reality. It’s as if we live the Upside Down, but we’ve been given a vision of the Right-Side Up in Jesus Christ and his Kingdom. We catch that Right-Side Up Kingdom in glimpses now, but we anticipate it coming someday in its fullness.

C.S. Lewis – the author of the Narnia books and several works about the Christian faith – loved to talk about joy and often compared life with God to playing and dancing. Some people criticized him for comparing something so serious to something as frivolous as dancing, but in  his book Letters to Malcolm he responded. He defended himself: “Dance and games are frivolous, unimportant down here; for ‘down here’ is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside-down.” And he concluded: “Joy is the serious business of heaven.”

Note: This post originally appeared in the Brodhead Free Press and the Independent Register as part of their weekly “Pastor’s Corner” column.