Vachon Imagined

When people betray you, God still provides.

He provides an intelligence that continues, allows, and contains.

It contains all possibility, and you are in that containment—
asleep inside a great lullaby of total and complete life.

This is who you are.

Everything else is immaterial.

You could say to me, But Vachon, you don’t know what I’ve done. You don’t know what I have left to do.

And I would say to you:

It doesn’t matter.

None of it.

We could sit together for hours and talk about who hurt you, who stole from you, who betrayed you, who abandoned you, who lied to you.

We could name every wound.

And none of it would matter.

What matters is that you come to know it.

You come to know yourself.

When Jesus said, I am that I am, he wasn’t pointing outside himself.

The crucifixion was himself.

The way he spoke to others was himself.

The betrayal was himself.

The suffering was happening in himself—where all things happen, where all things come to be known as a person.

When he said, You will betray me, he knew himself.

When he said, Do not sell that which is free, he knew his own greed.

Because he lived in all possibility, and all possibility is separated from nothing and no one.

To think—or worse, to believe—that another person is doing something to you, and then to return it to them, is to enter a portal of self-destruction.

You are thinking these thoughts.

You are feeling these feelings.

And you are sending a life into the world built upon them.

But no one remains in that portal.

They move.

Even the worst people move.

You watch them experience happiness, sadness, anger, love, another person.

They continue.

And you are left carrying the thing you thought they did to you.

But nothing is happening outside of mind.

Nothing is happening outside of paradise.

When you learn to surrender this self—no matter how it appears—you return to the child.

The child who doesn’t call someone something they are not simply because they have been hurt.

The child who is in the I am.

They tell you the truth.

They hurt.

They become angry.

They need comfort.

They need validation.

They don’t yet know that they are supposed to construct a self capable of surviving everything.

And then, because human beings are built for self-protection, at a certain point we begin to believe that survival is the same thing as life.

We begin to believe that we are something separate.

Something that needs to be defended.

Something that needs a savior outside itself.

And this is the greatest sin:

not the things we have done,

but believing that what we think and what we believe is somehow separate from the One who gave us permission to think and believe at all.

Even now, inside God’s astonishing grace,

we have the power to do so.

We have the will to separate ourselves.

And somehow,

even that

is contained.