Reconciliation is Part of Our Humanity
It was a surprisingly interesting afternoon—much better than I had anticipated.
But to explain why, I need to take you back more than ten years. Probably closer to fifteen.
As often happens, we had a falling out, and it must have been a serious one to last this long. I can hardly remember the details of our disagreement.
But fallings-out don’t just happen. They require strong emotions, self-aggrandizement over the other person’s needs and hopes, and, of course, the crown jewel of squabbles: misunderstanding.
Add a hefty dose of mindreading, as in “You think that…” and reverse mindreading, “You should know what I think…” and presto, you’re off the rails of sanity and well into the land of disruption and relational destruction.
And the clock has been ticking for a long time…
We’re all getting older, and after some recent tragedies, it seemed that attempting reconciliation was a really good idea.
Especially since, now that my wife and I were at our cabin, we were only an hour and ten minutes away from them. We had no excuse, which made the meeting a certainty, once they agreed to see us.
It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent years.
My sister and her husband greeted us warmly at the door of their lovely house in Lindsay. It was was beautifully decorated in southwest style, reminiscent of their winter home in Arizona.
We hugged them both, and immediately, the emotional and relational healing began.
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She had prepared a simple but delicious lunch, and I had brought a bottle of red wine, which paired well with the meal. The soft background music was country, a perfect choice for all four of us.
We ate, talked, and shared photographs on our phones, and after an enjoyable three and a half hours, we headed back to our cabin, after another healing hug.
“I have missed you so much!” she said, clinging to me, her seventy-one-year-old baby brother, at the front door of their home, and I responded in kind.
We will definitely arrange to see her again soon.
Life is far too short to let petty feelings, grudges, and self-righteousness fester.
To paraphrase the Wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings:
“We do not choose the times in which we are born. We only choose what we do with the time we have been given.”
It seems to me that reconciliation is a great thing to do with whatever time we have left.
And I believe that love can flourish and grow again if we decide to put away resentment and the errors of the past that we can barely remember anyway.
As my wife says: “Resilience is better than indignation.”
Don’t let time slip away from you.
Who can you reach out to who used to be in your life, but circumstances and human frailty have caused you both to drift apart?
The saddest words of all are “It might have been…”
But as Andrew Lloyd Webber said: “Love changes everything.”
I think he might be right.
- Mike Mandel
