Vachon Imagined

Every day you wake up, you step into a role.

And eventually, if you’re not careful, the role starts playing you.

This can get quite dizzying. You play the mother, the father, the employee, the boss, the good one, the difficult one, the responsible one, the wounded one—and after playing the role long enough, you start to think, Well, this is just who I am.

But we’re really no different from actors.

An actor takes on a role and, for a while, lives inside it. Some actors throw themselves so completely into characters that they become people they would never dare to be in their ordinary lives.

And then they leave the role.

We aren’t so different.

The trouble begins when we forget we’re acting.

Then life starts to feel monotonous. We start looking for something new to make us feel alive. An affair. A new relationship. A new job. A new house. Something new to eat. Anything that gives us the sensation that we have escaped ourselves.

But you cannot escape yourself by changing the scenery.

You were never created to stay the same.

You were created to move.

People change. Circumstances change. Your own desires change. The role you played yesterday may not be the role life is asking you to play today.

And this is why placing our ultimate trust in people is so difficult. Not because people are bad, but because people are moving.

So instead of asking a person to remain the same so that we can feel secure, we learn to place our trust in God, the thing that does not need to stop moving in order for us to feel safe.

God guides us into the next thing.

The next role.

The next word.

The next moment.

But we have to be humble enough to listen and assertive enough to step into what arrives.

That means we don’t have to believe so fiercely in ourselves.

Because which self?

The self from yesterday?

The self from five years ago?

The self who thought she knew exactly what she was doing?

That self is already gone.

What we can trust is something much bolder than our changing identity.

And perhaps this is where boldness actually comes from.

Not from being certain about who you are.

But from being willing to become whoever life is asking you to become next.

Not worried about what others will think.

Not worried about what others will say.

You put on the role.

You play it fully.

And when the scene changes, you take it off.

Then you listen.

Because there is another role coming.