Living in 3D in a Flat World

The Transfiguration and the Cure for Anxiety

Most of us live our lives on a flat, horizontal line.

If you were to map the geography of your anxiety this past week, it would almost certainly look like a long stretch of road. It runs backward into the past—Did I say the wrong thing in that meeting?—and it runs forward into the future—Will I have enough money? What if the test comes back positive?

This is the modern default setting: the Flat World.

The Flat World is built out of cause-and-effect, tasks and deadlines, notifications and responses. Time becomes a tyrant—one second ticking after another—like a conveyor belt you’re sprinting on, terrified of falling off.

The defining characteristic of the Flat World is that it has no ceiling and no floor.

No ceiling means we live as if there’s no higher reality above us to give the rat race meaning. We act like we have to be the boss of our own universe, manufacturing significance through sheer effort.

No floor means we live as if nothing is actually holding us up. We worry that if we stop running—even for a minute—everything will collapse. We feel unsupported, as if the only thing keeping us from slipping through the cracks is our constant striving.

This combination is a recipe for exhaustion. We are trying to carry the weight of existence on our own shoulders. We are acting as our own gods, and we are not built for it. The human soul wasn’t designed to live on a flat line. It was designed for altitude.

And that’s why the story in Matthew 17 hits like a splash of cold water.

Six days after Peter’s confession, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain. Before a miracle even occurs, the story is doing theology with geography. In Scripture, the valley is the place of toil, ambiguity, and the horizontal grind. The mountain is the Vertical—the place where earth rises up and heaven comes down, puncturing the flat plane with something deeper and truer.

Then it happens. Jesus is transfigured. His face shines like the sun. His clothes turn dazzling white. Moses and Elijah appear.

This isn’t just a "cool miracle moment." It’s a dimensional tear.

For a brief instant, the disciples see what is always true but usually hidden: the world is not flat. The "real world" isn’t just the dusty roads, the bills, the diagnoses, and the awkward meetings. The real world is thick with glory. It is heavy with the presence of God. History has a center, and the center has a face.

You would think this would feel like relief. If the Flat World crushes you with the burden of self-reliance, the mountain should be the ultimate exhale: It doesn’t all depend on me. I’m held.

But watch what happens next. Matthew is painfully honest about how humans respond to glory.

Peter gets scared. And in his fear, he does what anxious people do. He tries to manage the moment.

"Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here…"

Peter wants to build booths—little sacred tents, manageable containers. This is understandable. When life suddenly becomes big, bright, and uncontrollable, our instinct is to grab a clipboard and start organizing. We organize to avoid feeling small. We think, If I can categorize this, I don’t have to submit to it.

So we build our own booths.

When anxiety rises, we make lists. We double down. We tighten our grip. We try to organize our way out of dread. We think, If I can get everything into the right boxes—if I can control the variables—I’ll finally feel safe.

But God doesn’t let Peter finish the sentence.

"While he was still speaking," a bright cloud overshadows them, and a voice speaks: "This is my Son, the Beloved... listen to him!"

You cannot build a booth for a cloud. You cannot manage a cloud. You can only stand inside it. The Vertical interrupts Peter’s anxious construction project and commands the one thing we hate doing when we’re stressed: Stop. Listen. Receive.

The disciples fall to the ground, terrified. But here is the twist: the solution is not an idea. The solution is a touch.

Jesus comes to them. He touches them. He says, "Get up and do not be afraid."

He doesn't say, "Have a better strategy." He doesn't say, "Try harder to feel spiritual." He just says: Get up. Don’t be afraid. I’m here.

Now, there’s an obvious problem. We can’t stay on the mountain. We have jobs, families, bodies that get sick, and calendars that do not care about mystical experiences. We have to go back down.

But we cannot survive the valley if the valley is truly flat—if it really has no ceiling and no floor. If that’s the world we return to, anxiety will swallow us whole.

We need a floor. We need to know why the universe won’t collapse when we stop running.

This is where an old voice offers a surprisingly modern cure. Richard Hooker, writing centuries ago during a time of massive instability, offered a vision of reality that wasn't a panicked shortcut, but a sturdy foundation.

Hooker spoke of "Law," but not in the sense of rules or traffic tickets. For him, Law was the deep structure of reality. It is the way God holds the world together from the inside.

Hooker imagined a ladder connecting heaven and earth.

At the top is God—steady, unshakeable, the source of all order.

At the bottom is us—often shaky and confused.

And in between, God provides "laws" that aren't barriers, but bridges.

There is the law of nature: gravity, biology, the seasons. The world feeds us and sustains us not by accident, but by gift.

There is the law of reason: our ability to think, plan, and solve problems. This, too, is a gift.

Hooker refuses to let you treat ordinary life as "godless space." He refuses to let you believe that paying bills, making dinner, or solving a work crisis is outside of God’s care.

The Horizontal is not cut off from the Vertical. It is sustained by it.

This resolves the tension between "faith" and "planning." When you use your reason to solve a problem at work, you are not "away" from God; you are using the tool God gave you to navigate the floor He built. When you care for your children, you are cooperating with the grain of a creation God sustains.

The Flat World is lying to you.

It tells you there’s no ceiling, so you must invent meaning. It tells you there’s no floor, so you must hold everything together.

The Transfiguration calls that bluff. The universe is not a chaotic accident you have to manage by sheer force of will. It is an ordered creation, held together by an Eternal Law, sustained by a God who knows your name.

That doesn’t remove suffering. But it removes the most poisonous ingredient in modern anxiety: the belief that you are the architect of reality.

You can resign as General Manager of the Universe. The position has already been filled.

So what does it look like to live in 3D this week—down in the valley, with the bills and the meetings?

It looks like practicing the Vertical inside the Horizontal.

When anxiety pulls you backward into regret or forward into fear, pause long enough to remember the mountain. Remember that reality has depth. Then, do two things—not as a hack, but as a spiritual posture.

First, use your reason.

Take the problem in front of you seriously. Make the plan. Send the email. See the doctor. Create the budget. Reason is not the enemy of faith; it is one of God’s bridges. You are free to plan because you know the outcome doesn't determine your worth.

Second, refuse to "booth-build."

Refuse the illusion that controlling outcomes will finally make you safe. Do what you can, and then let yourself be held by what you cannot control.

The light on the mountain is not an escape from the valley. It is a revelation of what the valley really is.

The same Jesus who blazes with uncreated light is the Jesus who walks down the dirt path with his friends. The cloud lifts, the moment passes, and they see "no one except Jesus himself alone."

That is not a downgrade. That is the point.

The glory is real. The valley is real. And Jesus is Lord of both.

"Get up," he says. "Do not be afraid."

So we get up. We go back down. But not back into flatness. We go back into a world with a ceiling and a floor, where the Vertical reality keeps interrupting our frantic little construction projects to say, gently and stubbornly: I have you. Listen to him.