Vachon Imagined

When two people meet, they enter into an agreement.

Not necessarily a spoken one. An exchange. A relationship. A moment in which something is given and something is received.

But even this individual exchange is not happening outside of I.

We encounter what we are when it is revealed.

The person who made you angry, life.

The person who made you feel small, or as though you were being diminished because of your gender, your race, your status, your history, life.

The encounter revealed something.

And in that revelation, you meet yourself.

You may resist what is revealed, building unnecessary systems that cannot fix what has been revealed. The other person may resist what is revealed in them. And now neither of you wins.

You remain inside the same consciousness, each hoping that if you can destroy the other, control the other, or build enough around the problem, you will somehow become free.

But you don’t.

Because if you have to steal someone else’s power to possess your own, you’ve already lost it.

If your power depends upon making another person powerless, it was never power.

So we return to I.

The time of all time.
The ages of all ages.

Leaving this world of judgment, we meet it from somewhere deeper.

To rest in a power that does not need to conquer.

A power that gives us the courage to walk through a world filled with temptation, disillusionment, injustice, and pain without becoming what we resist.

Because the deepest freedom is not destroying what revealed us.

It is allowing the revelation to reveal us, and then choosing what we will become.

Knowing that whatever path we take, we are still walking in the image of God.

We are walking in a fantasyland of I, a world where everything we encounter is also an encounter with ourselves, where every person, every conflict, every temptation, every wound becomes part of the revelation.

We cannot step outside of I.

We can only decide what we will do with what I reveals.