Conflicted Choice

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Feel free to print and share.

CONFLICTED CHOICE

Conflicts, between nations and people, inevitable.

Collapse of systems, inevitable.

Conflict internally, inevitable.

Conflict, what to do, the assessment of what is right.  Leaving one’s  children to earn money to feed those children.  Choosing among overlapping demands of friends, family, obligations, God, church, team, patriotism, pets, colleagues.

Conflict and choice…..there is the core nature of this worldly life.  Each moment at work, playing with children, helping a friend, supporting the team, is a moment not given to all the others.

Law and order, compassion, enforcement, acceptance…...each of them right, each justifiable.  Each choice of what to do bringing to light everything not done.

We defer the choice to holy texts, to imams and preachers, to team colors, to authority, blessed authority, anyone, anyone to save us from the torment of choice.

There will be suffering, and we don't want to make it worse, but the lovingly purchased pet food entailed suffering and death of natural resources or confined domesticated livestock.

Conflict and choices, enough choice by one group of people leading to conflict with that other group who made a different choice.

It is all good.  It will all induce suffering.

Some agonize over the choices.  Others don't.

"Just make them" time and mortality demand.  Decide who will suffer, who you will neglect, while trying to love and help the others.  

Every opportunity is from God?.....but the "ruler of this world", satan or coyote or crow, confuses the issue.

Note and observe, record without judgement, then adjust as feels right.  That is a way to avoid taking control.  It is a way to make informed decisions.  

This is a finite world.  It is so in order to promote values and awareness.  It is the big Choice that matters.  

It is a world of mortality.  Only in the limitations of mortality do values and priorities arise.

God does indeed place before us opportunities, but we cannot take advantage of all of them.  The real opportunity is the Choice…..and there is no right answer for that Choice.  Manifold opportunities to rescue mean manifold necessities to neglect.  It is simply so in this world.  It is important,  critically important, to recognize that.

Give up control, but don't think that means escaping terrible choices.  The desire to escape moral choices leads to horrors of ISIS, Taliban, and Baptists.  Make informed decisions.  Be aware of what you are doing.  Accept, and this is critical, what you cannot do as determined by each choice of what to do.  

Yes, each life opportunity, each opportunity to serve and help and heal and rescue is from God, personally delivered to you, demanding your response.  And you cannot do it all.  It is a huge act of faith and spiritual growth to recognize and accept that.  

Mortality demands faith to accept what cannot be.  Eternity assures all good will be.  

Copyright 2025 Don Ray

Feel free to print and share.

Ancient Future Time

Copyright 2025 Don Ray

ANCIENT FUTURE TIME

07:32

Hillside

In a tribe of junipers.

This is the safe time, the ancient time.

Only bears and coyotes up here.

Sunday, bless-ed Sunday morning.

The noisy threats abate for a moment,

not exactly out of respect or reverence,

but tradition and societal norms will do,

if it momentarily quiets the violent cacophony.

Safe time.

Ancient time.

Future time.

Relationship Inflation

 

RELATIONSHIP INFLATION

Interpersonal connection is ultimately all we have, but its value has been subject to a deadly economic inflation as pseudo-connections have been rendered unlimited by digital media.  The principle at work  is the same as currency inflation.  Produce too much money in response to demand or economic weakness and the currency loses its value.  Our spiritual economic weakness, the hunger for more and more meaningful relationship, has been met with a profligate printing of currency in the form of FaceBook, Instagram, and the panoply of other social media.  We can connect with anyone anywhere at any time.  

As a result, individual relationships and interpersonal bond have been devalued.  We find ourselves in the position of so many nations throughout history who met economic privations not with addressing foundational economic weaknesses but by printing more money to momentarily placate the hungry, demanding masses.

We have not addressed the underlying crippling spiritual economic condition that leaves us hungry, empty, bitter, angry, frightened, and lonely.  We have responded to our spiritual ache of loneliness by minting ever more digital  interactions, rendering them all worthless.  We lug our bag of "likes", "followers", and "friends" to the relationship store and come away with a stale piece of bread, to which we respond by collecting more "likes", "followers", and "friends", each newly minted "connection" rendering all connections more superficial and fleeting.

Values of currencies arise only from the productivity underlying them, productivity in turn arising from work and investment.  Values of relationships likewise possess that value only when productive, when the exchange of relationship interaction among parties has some mutual and meaningful lasting benefit.  That is an economic parameter independent of any treasury, exchequer, or media corporation.  We each individually determine the value of the social currency we mint every day, with our authenticity, depth, and sincere listening, none of which are encouraged by screens and keyboards.  Log off.  Listen.  Care.  Watch the wealth accrue.

Riding Darkness

 

RIDING DARKNESS

Now dark, quickly dark.

Gentle motion reveals the presence of darkly invisible waves just out that window.  

We ride the dark surface, just as our lives ride the boundary between life and death, sensing motion, trying to maintain our balance, something out of our control rippling by our soul, sensed not seen, treading an unseen surface separating life from an utterly unknowable depth into which we will inevitably sink.  The darkness, the unknowable depth, the unseen ripples we sense and dark tsunamis we dread, the darkness, the blankness, the unknowable depths, that is our canvas, the great blank canvas of life without answers on which we decide what matters.

Meaningless Time

 Meaningless Time

Time.  Corporeal existence.  Somehow it is through those that interaction Reality arises.  Through those Deep Love arises.  And horrors arise.  And beauty arises.  

Time.  Matter.  For now what we have to work with.

Yet nothing arising from them has meaning other than in the eternal.  Here and Now is the moment of Creation, we a painful part of that Creation.

The time and vanishing physical forms are illusions.  Yet through them we are empowered by God to create the eternal, eternal bonds and Love.

"Do not be discouraged", whispers Spirit.  Our capacity for control and power seems terribly limited.  Our wishes and will, even when uttered in the name of Jesus, seem pointless and hopeless.  Yet time deceives, making us think that the will of God is not unfolding.  Our entrapment in the Now blocks our view of unfolding Purpose and fulfillment of our hopes.  Our incarceration in the corporeal keeps us apart.  Yet in the usual Paradox, it is that corporeal and temporal nature that facilitate  creation of the real and enduring.

Faith, faith worn and tattered by the interminable delay of prophecy, faith is our source of warmth in the biting cold of the temporal world.  Faith is a capacity to sense and know beyond the body of Now.  

The moment will pass, has already passed.  The physical forms are disappearing before our eyes.  All that passing makes room for fulfillment of our prayers.  All that is real and meaningful takes time.  That is the oft repeated lesson, the lesson of the widow and of the bridesmaids.  Time and the physical, in their fleeting passage, erect the eternal.  Hold fast to the vision of faith, to awareness of Truth.  So much better, a seemingly delayed answer that endures through eternity than an instant gratification that just as promptly disappears along with the rest of the world.  Be glad the answers to your prayers are not immediately evident in the world, for that would mean they would just as quickly disappear along with the world.  

Let it unfold.  Do not be deceived by time.  The needs are known.  The prayers are heard.  Their fulfillment will not be through anything as unreliable as worldly outcomes.  Hold fast to faith as you watch time render the corporeal to dust, thereby making room for answers eternal.

Children of the Cast Off God

 

Children of the Cast Off God

Wondrous things are happening, people, even these people, doing wondrous things.

They are terribly disappointing, these people, yet the potential of God resides within them.

Do not look for perfection.  Do not look for control.  But define for them a need and direction, and give them some freedom, opportunity, and encouragement, and sometimes miraculous things will unfold.  

A frightening, even terrifying lot, magnanimous generosity and irrational cruelty keeping close company in their hearts.  Expect little.  Hope for much.  Give up all hope of understanding them or explaining their behavior.  Love them, but don't get too close.

Fear them.  Do not condemn them.  Forget any pretensions of teaching them.

Somewhere in their self-perpetuated chaos resides the Kingdom of Heaven.  Don't frustrate yourself trying to make sense of that.  

Curse them, bless them, flee from them, embrace them.  The Universe orbits about them, all Creation exists for them, and they will steadfastly lay claim to their central position while not bothering with gratitude for it.

Wondrous things are happening, and the children of the cast-off-God are doing wondrous things.  Marvel at it all and smile along with their neglected God.  

The Unwelcome New

 The Unwelcome New

Raging wind.  Power out.  Phone out.  A sneak preview of our future.

Chaos and turbulence rage.

It is glorious.

All communication is cut off.

It is glorious.

One by one Christmas decorations blow away.

It is sad.

(Bodhi kitty enters, unsettled.)

Disconnected and alone, the mind indulges in the rare opportunity, absorbing the chaos and storm.  

(Too noisy for the Bodes who flinches at a bang and retreats from the last violent burst.)

The would-be tyrants will take advantage of the growing chaos.  God will take advantage of the growing chaos.

Social DNA and spiritual genomics will battle for survival to determine what crawls out of the wreckage to become the newly triumphant politico-economic system.  In the meantime, warlords and gunslingers will reign supreme, occasionally donning the accouterments of tetrarch or judge to gain a facade of respectability.  

This prediction is no vision or prophecy, it is common sense, and a clear-eyed reading of human history.  

We will craft new procedures for selecting our priests and chieftains by whatever titles, who in reality will select themselves as they always have.  

For now the winds rage and cracks appear, the despots-to-be scurry about to advantageously position themselves for the deconstructions.  Outcomes remain hidden by the unyielding wall of time.  Tyrants and Divinity move their chess pieces on the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of society's board. 

"There will be change" declares the storm as winds of chaos strain the moorings of civilization's delicate web.  

There will be change, as there has always been change, the feared and unwelcome "new" triumphing, rising from our wreckage, rising from seeds scattered and moistened by the storm, seeds already produced, waiting, waiting, seeds cast aside in the combat of our world, seeds needing only fresh soil, exposed soil, the overlying structures stripped away that earth may breathe again.