What are you grasping at right now? What would make this day feel like a “success”? Maybe it’s having your kids listen to you or hearing praise at work. Maybe it’s having enough money in your checking account so that you don’t have to worry about how you’ll afford new tires for your car (or the gas to put in it). Maybe it’s a feeling instead of a circumstance: feeling valued, content, satisfied, powerful, in control, beautiful, heroic, wise, charismatic, peaceful, joyful.
We are all chasers and climbers, ever striving for the next thing. The human heart does not know what it means to be stationary. It is, by nature, a thing that seeks.
What do you with your ever-grasping heart? For most of us, we build ladders to nowhere.
Ladders to Nowhere
David Powlison used the expression “ladders to nowhere” in reference to the futile pursuits of the heart, our incessant striving for things or experiences that don’t actually satisfy us.
Listen to what he says.
In our pride, in our haughtiness, in our going after matters too great, it’s as though we set up in our lives ladders to nowhere. They’re like ladders against blank walls. They don’t actually go to a floor. They have no endpoint. The only thing you can do is fall off them. And people live their whole lives climbing these ladders to nowhere and falling off. Or in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, there was a great image for this: he said people climb “stairs of sand” in their lives (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 86–89). You see it in yourself for starters. We keep building ladders to nowhere, stairs of sand, but they don’t actually end up leading us to life. In fact, they mis-define life. They attempt to define value and stigma, success and shame, good and evil, desirable and abhorrent, but they do so in a way that has no cash value at the end of the day. The obvious ones tend to be where we get stuck. We judge life by the neighborhood we live in, how healthy we are, what a good athlete we are, how big our church is, how successful our career is, what our kids look like, and whether they’re better than somebody else’s kids. These are all ladders to nowhere. We rank ourselves based on these things, but they take us nowhere. (Dissecting the Heart, 176)
Neighborhoods. Health. Athletics. Church reputation. Career success. These are all ladders to nowhere. Oh, sure—we climb up them a great distance, and it feels good to look down on others. But the illusion of height creates the illusion of superiority. It’s all smoke and mirrors. And in the end, no matter how high we climb, we always, always, always fall off. Ladders to nowhere are ladders to death.
“This remarkable book provides all the necessary ‘Powlison pieces’ to help you grasp how God combines his Word and his sovereign grace with your counseling skills in a way that moves hurting people toward Jesus Christ.”
— Joni Eareckson Tada
Identifying Ladders
Ladders to nowhere are easy to identify.
First, you spend a great deal of time and energy climbing them. That thing you’re grasping for today . . . you’ll spend a lot of thought, planning, and effort to chase it.
Second, your satisfaction in grasping it will be short-lived. Just when you think you’ve climbed the final rung of the ladder, another appears. The neighborhood isn’t elite enough. Your health is fading in an area you neglected. Your body rebels against your athletic routine. The figures you once revered at church turn out to be “average” or get caught in scandals. Your career takes a sudden nose-dive or new competition moves into town. There is always more, always another rung.
Ladders to nowhere are ladders to death.
The fact that you think there aren’t many more rungs left only goes to show how coy the devil is. He’s the one, after all, who owns the ladder company. His aim isn’t just to kill you quickly; it’s to kill you quietly. And what better way to off the competition in silence than by distracting people with all the things they think they want? Satan’s Ladder-to-Nowhere Co. was founded on a simple principle: keep people climbing.
Third, a whisper of doubt and disappointment keeps eking its way into your heart. It would irritate you to no end to realize that your ladder has no upper limit. And so you do your best to silence the whispers and keep moving. Everyone else around you seems to be doing the same thing.
Our only hope is getting off the ladder.
Getting Off the Ladder
Let’s say you identify one of your ladders. What then?
Maybe an example will help. One of my ladders is thinking too much of what others think of me. The Bible calls this “fear of man.” It’s not that I’m afraid of people; it’s that I’m afraid of what I will feel like if they don’t praise me. And let me tell you, as a writer, that ladder is very easy to climb. The secular perspective on growing as a writer pushes authors to “make a name for yourself.” It’s too bad that humanity already tried that once, and it didn’t go very well (Genesis 11:4). Strive to make a name for yourself, and only one thing will follow: disappointment, confusion, and isolation. Babel awaits all writers aiming to make a name for themselves. Still, I find myself at times climbing the ladder, hoping for others to think well of me.
Babel awaits all writers aiming to make a name for themselves.
I have to get off the ladder. But how? By turning my heart towards the gospel of Jesus Christ. He has the only name worth “making something of,” and yet he gave that name to his followers, asking his Father to keep them in it: “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me” (John 17:11). Why would Jesus do this? So that we could have a room in God’s house (John 14:2-3). God puts us in his name so he can keep us forever. There is light and laughter in those holy letters.
While making a name for myself brings death, hiding in God’s name brings life. This is the gospel. It gets me off my ladder to nowhere and offers me peace.
The peace I experience in Christ is something the Psalmist meditates on in Psalm 131. As Powlison reflects on that psalm, he comes to the image of a weaned child (131:2). “This,” he writes, “is a picture of what the grace of the gospel does. We are weaned from these things that drive us crazy, and by which we drive others crazy, so that we’re no longer rooting, banging, anxious, squalling. Instead, we are the weaned child sitting on his mother in peace” (Dissecting the Heart, 179).
One thing I know by this point in my writing career is that striving to make a name for myself will make me crazed: rooting, banging, anxious, and squalling. I need Jesus. I need the gospel. The calm to the craze comes from the outside.
It is a mercy to have your ladder to nowhere knocked down.
Powlison was even more direct in telling us how we find peace amidst our ladder climbing, how we compose our soul with the psalmist. “How do you compose your soul? In part, the ladder gets knocked down; there’s a merciful Lord and a very tangible promise in which you hope” (Dissecting the Heart, 179). Hear this: It is a mercy to have your ladder to nowhere knocked down. Why? Because then you can hope in something real, something eternal, something divine: Christ himself.
Conclusion
There’s nothing inherently wrong with living in a nice neighborhood, or having a healthy body, or building a successful career. These are good gifts from God. They are little invitations to witness his beauty, harmony, and redemption. But they are not ladders. And the more we try to climb them—investing our life’s joy and meaning in them—the harder we’re going to fall.
May God knock down our ladders to nowhere and set us face-to-face with his Son.
Thank you for writing this, thinking it through, and publishing it.
I have much admiration for David Powlison. He was so solid, so rooted, and so helpful.
Thank you for the honesty of your personal illustration. If I was to mention one of my own, I would say I know it is a ladder to nowhere. Each rung, though, brings me pleasure, and that keeps bringing me back to the ladder.
It is the realization, from this post, that the ladder leads to death that I must see. I'm not referring to some catastrophic sin. The little sins, or medium sins, lead me to death too. Lots of little or medium deaths.
Again, thank you.
Incredible!!! Thank you for sharing your heart.