What if the Tenth Realm is Calling? By Michelle Griep

One of my dear author friends, Michelle Griep (who is a Fabulous author) has been writing and posting a Viking time-slip Romance Novel over on her Substack Account. If you don't know what Substack is, it is kind of like a blog but has different subscription levels.  Anyway, last week she posted these wonderful words, and I asked her if I could share here.  So, here we go!

 Why Spiritual Hunger Won’t Leave Us Alone  by Michelle Griep

You wake. You work. You fold laundry. You answer emails. And in the quiet moments—standing at the sink, driving alone, staring out a window—something inside you whispers, “There’s more than this.”

The Vikings imagined nine realms branching from the great tree, Yggdrasil. Everything had its place. Gods. Giants. Humans. Fire. Even the dead. It was orderly. Contained and explained.

But their stories are full of cracks—wanderers who appear from nowhere, doors opening at the wrong time, fate bending in unexpected ways. Even within their mapped universe, something pressed at the edges.

And I don’t know about you, but even today I feel that pressing, too.

It’s felt when success doesn’t satisfy. When comfort grows dull. When beauty makes us ache. When grief is too big to hold. Some say those feelings are restlessness. Others say it’s longing for what we don’t have. But Scripture calls it something else, that we were made for more.

Honestly? The hunger you feel is not an accident. You were created for more, for communion with the God who exists outside every system we build. Outside every tree. Outside every realm.
But something went wrong. Way wrong. Not just out there in the world but in us.

The Bible calls it sin. Yet it’s more than smoking in the bathroom or stealing a few pens from work. Sin isn’t merely bad behavior but something worse—something that separates us from God. A fracture between humanity and the One who made us, and it’s the fracture that explains the ache, why even our best days feel unfinished. Which is super sad if you ask me. If the story ended there, that hunger would be cruel.

But.
It doesn’t end there.

The gospel says the God beyond all realms did not remain beyond them. He entered our world, not as a distant force, but as a man—Jesus Christ. He stepped into history. Into flesh. Into suffering. He didn’t come to add another god to the list.

He came to reconcile what was broken.

At the cross, the separation we feel in our bones was addressed. At the resurrection, death itself was defeated. And suddenly the longing we carry is no longer just an empty yearning—it becomes an invitation to receive grace for reconciliation with the God who made you and loves you.

And that is why the ache will not leave you alone—because deep down you are not hungry for success or distraction or even meaning in the abstract. You are hungry for Him. Homesick for the kingdom you were made for.

The Vikings believed fate was woven and fixed. The gospel says something far more radical, that the Author stepped into the story. That freedom is possible. That eternity is not locked up inside some tree.

If you’ve ever felt that quiet pull toward something that feels like home, you are not foolish. You may be hearing the call of the One who stepped beyond every boundary—every realm—to find you.

The nine realms were a way of explaining everything that is. But Christ did not come to rearrange the realms. He came to mend the fracture between Creator and creation.

What if the Tenth Realm I dreamed up isn’t a metaphor at all? What if it is the reality beyond the created order—the kingdom of God breaking into our fractured world?

The ache you feel is not random. It is not weakness. It is not naïveté. It is the echo of a door opening. And that door is not a place.

It is a Person…Jesus Christ.