"God's invisibility and untouchability keep our yearnings focused right where they rightly belong, on the supernatural realm that awaits us.  His written Word combines with evidences in this spectacular but limited physical realm to communicate that His desire and plan involve transporting us, at some future point along our time line, across our dimensional barriers into His super-dimensional realm."  (Hugh Ross, in Beyond the Cosmos: The Extradimensionality of God: What Recent Discoveries in Astronomy and Physics Reveal About the Nature of God)

I've met my Timothy Leary, and his name is Hugh Ross.  Reading this Christian physicist's book, Beyond the Cosmos, is mind-altering, even mind-expanding, sans psychotropic drugs.  While I'm only about halfway through the book, already I'm fascinated by Ross's ability to help us imagine what is really unimaginable -- the existence of more than four dimensions and how such an understanding (if you can call our imaginings, "understanding"), helps us begin to appreciate the paradoxes of scripture, like the Trinity, the omnipresence of God, the nature of Heaven, predestination and free will, and so on.

While reading about this, a question came to me that I don't think Ross directly addresses, that is, if we are made in the image of God, in what sense, if any, do we image (using the word as a verb) the super-dimensionality of God?  For example, as God is not bound by our space and time dimension, is there some faint way in which we participate in such transcendence by virtue of having been made in God's image?  I think maybe so.

Perhaps some of the odd sensations we have are a result of this imaging.  For example, most people have experienced deja vu, a sense of having been in a place before.  Well, perhaps in some sense we have.  Perhaps this is a very, very faint reflection of God's super-dimensionality, his omnipresence.  Or, as I have mentioned before, I feel at times the sense of being very close to my childhood.  Perhaps this propinquity is a pale reflection of God's being outside of our plane of time.  And then there are the really odd coincidences.  For example, a few years ago I was in Tucson, Arizona at a restaurant, nearly 3000 miles from home, when, getting up to excuse myself I passed in front of a waiter.  He stopped me and said "Aren't you. . ." and said my full name.  I said yes.  He said "I was in your 5th grade.  You haven't changed a bit."  Well, given that it had been 32 years, that was amazing.  I did not recognize his name or his face.  So why do things like that happen?

These odd happenings can be nothing, of course, or they can be as I have mentioned -- God's image-bearers experiencing in just the slightest way a touch of God's super-dimensionality.  For me it's just a reminder, a message from beyond, that we were built for glory, for something indescribable.  Like Ross says, it keeps our yearnings focused right where they belong, on that place called Heaven.

Read Hugh Ross.  It's quite a trip.