First try: internal sense and eyeball; tap in the nails, hang it, step back, and nope, not level. Second: remove glasses for undistorted adjustment; rehang, step back, and still no. Third: spend 10 minutes finding level, 2 more finding pencil, mark the wall, rehang, step back, and still no; indeed, worse than before. Perhaps another step back. Ah, now the problem is obvious and uncertain. The floor, wall, and ceiling meet in acute and obtuse angles, none right. On the good side, now I can hang it and not worry that it does not look level in an apparently non-Euclidean former garage.
Paul tells the Corinthians he has become all things to all men that he might save some by whatever means possible. There are standards legitimately skewing untold directions: culture and language, economy and industry, education and interest, skill and exclusion, politics and cause. To use English illustrating the gospel with a story about a lost cow in East Texas does not compromise the non-bovine nature of eternal redemption.
Later in the same letter, Paul says every person speaking in their congregation must align with what he writes, or not be recognized to speak at all. Regardless of where all the other lines point, there is a single level established by the distance to earth’s center and apparent with any measure of gravity: machined bubble level or Egyptian flooded plane. In the modern world where miracles make no sense, we affirm unequivocally the one truly great miracle of history—the resurrection—and all of its corollaries, and we don’t worry at all that it squares not one bit with any other line in the room.
Hanging truth in post-Edenic space can make even stalwarts doubt the true is level as much as the skewed. Trust Scripture’s bubble.
To a week living heaven level but catawampus connected and kind.