“Making a choice” is when there are two things before you but you only get to choose one.  It is the spoiled brat in you who thinks he can have both.  It is the Cain in you who thinks he can have both.
At the fork in the road, you can’t continue down both roads at the same time or splits you in two.
You can chose hate or love. Not both.  You cannot both hate your enemy and love yourself at the same time.  Why? Because they are both you.
You cannot both nurse your resentment for life’s rejection and enjoy peace in its acceptance at the same time.
You cannot both nurse your resentment for God's rejection and enjoy peace in His acceptance at the same time.

What do you do when God rejects you?
I don't know.  I guess you'll make your choice.  
​
It took me a long time to figure this out, but I chose Him anyway.

Peter Pan
It is a story about you.
It begins with a boy who lost his shadow.


This is a parallelism to Christ’s warning about one evil spirit and the clean house.


The most unruly ruler believes rules get rid of unruliness.  But getting rid of unruliness is impossible because ruliness and unruliness are like states of matter.  They just are. 
Unruliness is dependent on ruliness, just as ruliness can not exist without unruliness.
In the same way, it is wrong to say cleaning gets rid of dirt.  Of course it doesn’t.  In fact, it is just as easy to say cleaning makes more room for dirt.  
Cleanliness does not get rid of dirtiness.  
A set of external rules for right behavior does not get rid of wrong behavior.  It does not do anything because it is just a concept.  And a concept cannot do anything about something as real as evil.  Or said another way, morality that has a motive to accomplish something, accomplishes nothing.  It can neither create good nor destroy evil—if anything, it does the opposite.  Rather, good and evil simply exist, in the same way high and low do—one only exists in relation to the other. The rules the ego learns to follow are not primary education. They are an epiphenomenon of existence. It is why it was essential that the Ten Commandments were inscribed by the hand of God Himself—not man.  Just as it was essential that Jesus walk into the wilderness and stand in front of the mirror to face his brother—his dark self—Satan—not because he was told to do it, but because it was foretold by existence itself.   At the very beginning, the moment man awoke to self-consciousness in the garden, exactly then, he beheld a core of poisonous fruit in his palm.  From the tree that should not have been touched because it made the knowledge of God become the knowledge of man.   The moment man ingested desire--wanting--value—he blinded himself to the only cure: to un-desire, un-knowing, un-holding.


The villain never really dies.  He always comes back.  By not speaking his name Voldemort only comes back with more horcruxes. So something else must be done with evil besides pretending its not there or it multiplies seven-fold.  Somehow simply knowing of its close quarters in our heart, saps evil its power. 


It is learning to live with dirt—incorporate it—accept it—in your life that makes a home livable.
An Evil spirit does not exist without the good. And good can not be understood without evil. It is in seeing this and incorporating this, that halts the multiplication of evil within.

Jeremiah 2:14
Is anyone born as a slave?  
Or, as Jeremiah puts it: “Is Israel a servant, a slave by birth?”
I mean spiritually, psychologically, individually. No. We are free. Born as free as a bird in the sky. Free of the burden of the ego. Free of enculturation. So, the answer is no, we are born free.  
So who puts us into bondage? 
Jeremiah answers: “Have you not brought this on yourselves?” v17 
Which is similar to the profound idea:
            What goes out of you comes back to you as what’s happening to you.
Psychologically, we flat out reject our responsibility in the negative aspect of that statement, but on its positive aspects we quickly seize all credit and inflate ourselves with air.  Our psyche is wrong on both counts. We are double-blind:  blind, both to the evil within us and to the goodness without us. Like Samson; blind in two worlds. The world above and the world below.  Frankenstein’s monster is created this way. 

In all our running around and moralizing, “I am not defiled. I am not defiled. I serve no Baals!” (v23ff).  We loudly announce the approach our self-righteous morality to our own wicked spirits within us, so that they never have to fear being caught. These bandits can happily sit in our blindspot waiting for our inner moral police, our endlessly arguing attorneys, and our hypocritical judges (our entire mock self-judicial system) to leave so they can do whatever they want with our lives, our desires, our actions, and our thoughts.  Just look around you, moron. Look at the inner and outer Gotham of your lives.  
We have an invisible mole sitting right within our inner police force—spying out our morality. That is a HUGE problem to get around.  (Impossible?) If my own moral bloviating to myself IS the thing giving Evil the upper hand in my life, what can I do? How can I hide from myself? How can I keep my exhausting thoughts on the rules of good and bad behavior secret from my evil self? 
I must turn against my own moral system which I have corrupted—turn against the lawless laws of the pharisees; reject the unshielding armor of King Saul—and trust the hero. I must, deep within the walls, in the silence of night, give the justice of my broken city over to someone else.  Someone that comes mysteriously both from outside and inside.  I must trust in that which is both deeper and higher than I—that which completely transcends me.  I must become less. I must remove myself and give up control as ruler of the city.  I must trust in the one who knows what to do.

“Where does your amazing strength come from to defeat the enemy?”
Samson replies, “Alright, alright. You keep nagging me and I keep telling little lies about myself, but here is the real truth.  My strength lies in my hair.”


    NO! WRONG! Samson’ strength was a gift from God.  The hair was a gift—a symbol—gifted; given—but still just a material thing. Anything that is given comes from a source.  Where the gift comes from—who the gift comes from—the “relationship” to the source—is what infuses it with power.  And the source is what replenishes the gift with the power to defeat the enemy—as long as you remain mindful of—have a relationship with— the source.  It is just the same with any relationship.  The “gift of strength” does not reside in the thing itself. It is a terrible mistake to confuse symbols for the actual treasures—abstractions for the actual gifts, for power. To confuse this, is to disconnect, to shear, to “let a hand touch your head.”  And when this disastrous mistake occurs; the symbol is gone, and with it, the gift.  Delilah did not trick Samson.  Samson was the one playing tricks. And like all tricksters, he relied on distraction, confusion, and lack of attention.  Samson tricked himself.  Samson betrayed God, and in doing so, betrayed himself. He became blind. Only when he grew the strength of character to talk to the Lord again and ask one last chance to change—to make things right—did he reveal his understanding of  who his real enemy was. Samson is the one who had to go—to die. It is the last place anyone wants to look—it is dark, deep, lonely.  It was in the filth, in the dust, in the dirt, at the bottom, in the belly of the beast, that he found what he needed most. When Samson finally discovered who was the true enemy, the true betrayer, he knew what to do.  “And in his death he defeated more enemies than when ‘he’ was alive.”
    I remember feeling like Dorothy waking up at the end of Oz, in her bed with her family surrounding her, for the first time with joy in her heart.  The great lesson of “The Wizard of Oz” is not that the source of power resides in the ruby slippers (Dorothy had those on right from the start).  The great lesson is that the power to get home springs from one’s deep understanding and admission after defeating the enemies within, that “there’s no place like home.”

There is one in you. Sent to you. He has always been there. Near you. Speaking to you. He is good. He is right. He has been with you since the beginning. He has been trying to show you how to live, how to speak, where to walk, how to see. Through all your endless changes; from the “one cell” of you,  to the mass of cells of which make up you now; his face, his voice has been constant—the rock around which you flow.  But there is another: an adversary of the one sent by God. He says, “Enough!  You are old enough. You are grown enough. You have sufficient strength and knowledge to create yourself in your own image. Worship what you want. ‘Want’ what you want. Follow rules. Even better, have a morality that you can manipulate to your constant advantage over others. Just know that it doesn’t matter anyway. But, if you suffer—when you suffer—when you feel the injustice and unfairness of this world, when you feel betrayed; it is not by me (I’m on YOUR side)...and certainly, it is not you (YOU are not supposed to suffer). It is God and His creation that are to blame.”

What are the works that God requires?
“The work of God is this: 
To believe in the one He has sent.”
John 6:28 and 29