The typical Christian characterization of Heaven is one that I find fundamentally boring. For me, the pursuit of knowledge and applications of that knowledge are what truly excite me, and so the idea of being a ministering angel forever or even just creating worlds over and over sounds like it could get extremely … repetitive. And repetition like that breeds boredom for me.

A while ago I was thinking about Heaven and otherworldly things, and I got an idea about one way it might work out. The more I develop the idea, the more it appeals to me, but I also acknowledge that there are some aspects in my conceptualization that don’t fit traditional narratives. I fully acknowledge that it could be completely wrong. And yet, it appeals to me and it excites me.

I imagine God as a scientist, working in a laboratory. He’s got his Univers-o-matic set up in the lab, and it is inside this machine that our entire universe exists. He has the controls to pause it, fast forward, rewind, and so on as much as he likes. Within this universe, we exist. He is using this machine to breed intelligent beings, and upon “completion” of that work, he can extract those beings into his own universe.

To us, we have no idea that this is going on. The nature of our existence is such that we do not perceive time being stopped, or rewound, or fast-forwarded. We simply experience it as a linear flow. But to God, he can endlessly pause and tweak and try new variations, all the while trying to maximize the potential of the extractable beings. So, as someone prays, he has the ability to skip to relevant points in time and alter how things happen, all the while trying to deal with the cascading consequences of those alterations. He can pause our universe, and just sit and think about what he should do next.

(Now I’m going to go off the rails a bit, but bear with me)

God is not the only one who works in this lab. He’s got a whole bunch of lab assistants and graduate students and interns and whatnot, and they’re all making tweaks as well. A while ago, he had one assistant who went really bad, and he had to kick him out. This assistant caused some political drama in the lab, and a bunch of other assistants left as well. Now this ex-assistant breaks in to the lab at night and tries to screw around with the machine as much as he can.

The interesting thing (to me) about this conceptualization is the implications of such a lab. This is one lab out of many. This is a building full of labs. But there are also things outside the lab. There is a whole world of these beings; the lab is only one part of their society. They still have restaurants and artists and musicians and zillions of other professions of which you could be a part. Maybe God wasn’t always one of these lab technicians. Maybe he used to be a celestial garbage man and took night classes and eventually worked his way to getting his own lab. Maybe he was a chef. Maybe he was a librarian. Who knows?

But what is exciting is the realization that maybe I won’t be “stuck” doing the same thing over and over again for all eternity. Maybe there are other eternal professions I can try out.

Maybe I could invent some better celestial door locks.