Vachon Imagined

She sat across from him on an ordinary day, talking about his mother’s health, his confusion about whether to stay in his job or not. He spoke as if to cast it onto something outside of his own awareness:

“It’s in God’s hands.”

She could instantly feel something building inside her.

Who’s he? she thought.

And she went there.

“David, who’s he?”

His eyes, once soft and kind, just moving in time, pierced through her as though she had suddenly turned into a devil, offending his whole sense of self.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s God.”

“But why did you say he?”

“Because it’s a him.”

He put his hands down on the table as if to say, Look, lady. This is the end of the discussion.

She listened.

Because she liked her body attached to her limbs.

And she loves him.

She let it go because he was showing her something. He was firm.

Don’t cross this line.

And she didn’t.

But she knew, walking away, life would keep crossing that line he had held up in his fixed imagination, his fixed strength.

Life would keep showing itself to him.

He could either acquiesce to its permission or keep fighting to sustain a God who doesn’t need him to.

What does giving it to Him mean?

Yourself to another self?

Or are you surrendering?

And if you are surrendering, then you must surrender that too, yes?

The knowing.

The certainty.

The shape and perception that would ultimately dictate how he saw everything, including himself.

But no.

He was fixed.

No.

And there was a human cost to that fixedness.

The cost of being human.

The cost of being alive enough to experience it.

The hardness toward himself.

The hardness toward her.

Toward them.

Toward anything trying to enter in—

Love.

Spirit.

Life born from life itself.

Not a God outside of it.

A God he had made so far outside of life that he could no longer see Him moving through it.

Anger grew inside her, but she remained grounded.

Don’t move.

Not now.

Because she could feel the hardness of it.

How something meant to be surrender had become resistance. How something meant to open him to God had become a wall against everything that might enter him through love, through spirit, through life itself.

Because it is in everything.

In everyone.

An intelligence that never dies.

And when people don’t know this, they live dead.

That’s the irony of fixed imagination.

It can’t move.

It can’t explore.

It can’t live.

Not without fear, anger, and distrust.

So let them have it, she thought.

It’s not worth it.

And it wasn’t.