Moral Ambiguity

 Startled awake from a nightmare, I see 2:54 A.M. shine across the bedroom from our digital clock. A phrase forms in my mind as I move my legs to the side of the bed, getting my bearings before standing up. Crossing the cold tile floor to the bathroom, I recall parts of the dream and come to full alertness. Rats! Another middle-of-the-night start to my day. 

After finishing using the bathroom, I force myself to crawl back into bed, determined to stay there until I fall back asleep, but I can’t stop the whirling thoughts over the dream's content. I give up on my restless flopping fish dance. Thinking of strong, hot coffee and the phrase, moral ambiguity, I make my way to the kitchen.  

 With the first sip of coffee, I wrote the scenes in my writer’s notebook and thought about the meaning. The dream morphed rapidly through four settings that contained the same theme. A flood of toxic goo quickly rose in basements, but life was still going on as if it wasn’t a threat.

Moral ambiguity is uncertainty about whether something is right or wrong. The hardest part of the dream was my inability to warn people about their lack of standards, particularly God’s standards. A lack of moral standards means we have no standards but our own. When we don’t live for something and Someone more significant than ourselves, we grow inward, downward to a me-focused life. 

“Moral ambiguity leads to terminal hopelessness,” pinged around my mind like a sonar detecting a Japanese submarine in McHale’s Navy TV sitcom. I read another suicide account of a young, talented, up-and-coming actor every week. Terminal hopelessness is sweeping our nation, robbing our young of a full life.

 In The Magician’s Nephew from the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis wrote about a fictional wood between the worlds. His description is a cautionary story of a place I avoid, where nothing happens and I don’t notice. 

“The strangest thing was that, almost before he had looked about him, Digory had half forgotten how he had come there. If anyone had asked him ‘Where did you come from?’ he would probably have said, ‘I’ve always been here.’ As he said long afterward, ‘It’s not the sort of place where things happen. The trees go on growing, that’s all.’”

The children, Digory and Polly, were caught in the wood between the worlds, between adventure and ambiguity. I choose God’s adventurous life and the creative life He gives me. Until my last breath.

My friends, Pat and John, introduced me to lovely Doc. My smile tells the whole story of a beautiful ride and generous friends.