Thursday, June 16, 2011

Reconciliation

A sip of coffee in the morning. Especially on a Friday morning with the weekend spread out before you like an open landscape. Birds sing and a soft breeze comes through your car window. Everyone is a little more talkative at work and smiles come light and easy.

You've been fighting with your friend and you can't seem to let go of your entitlements and sense of fairness. They stop by in the evening and give you a hug and ask for your forgiveness. You feel a lightness, an easiness and your muscles unfold and relax. A few tears fall and you tell them you're sorry.


There's a hundred other moments during the week where you find comfort or long for comfort. The word reconciliation weaves its' way in and out of these moments. Every moment you find comfort during the week is your heart longing to be reconciled. We think the longing is merely for comfort and peace but it's really so much deeper than that. Comfort and peace is only the surface. The longing really is to be reconciled to the way things once were and the way that, we hope, things might be again. The sip of the coffee, the hug with your friend, the harmony of life that you long for most especially when you experience the dissonance of pain, boredom, discomfort, or fear; they are all longings for reconciliation if you look closely enough. You see, if you don't view these things as reconciliation, you'll just view them as comfort and peace. What I mean is, comfort and peace are meant to be feelings within a larger story. Reconciliation is the larger story. You and your friend experienced a fracture in your friendship and through forgiving each other, there is comfort and peace in your reconciliation. Comfort and peace without reconciliation means you and your friend are fighting and you feel like crap so you grab a beer out of the fridge and now you feel great. You experience comfort and peace but no reconciliation. One that hits closer to home for me would be living half-hearted day after half-hearted day until finally you take that weekend trip and while you're away on vacation you feel so alive and comforted and at peace and then you return to your half-hearted life during the week. This is comfort and peace without a larger story of reconciliation. Eventually you'll end up with a life full of some random, interspersed beautiful scenes that don't really fit together and leave you confused and trying to convince yourself that you lived for something meaningful. But if you view comfort as a reconciliation with the way things were originally designed, then you'll find yourself living a beautiful story with an overarching and reverberating theme woven throughout. Your moments of comfort and peace will find a context and a resting place.

If you're going to be reconciled to the original design, you must first ask the question though, "Can you reconcile yourself? Can you reconcile yourself to the original design?" Think about it. And don't think about what you say you believe but think about what you actually believe? Look at the landscape of your past. You were able to reconcile yourself to an extent, weren't you? But then there are still pains and things that happened to all of us that we don't understand. To put it plainly, we all may have done great reconciling ourselves for a while but we never really ended up finding a resting place where we felt reuly at peace.

If we can't reconcile ourselves to the original design then the answer must come outside ourselves. Look at the landscape of your past again. Were you best moments of comfort actually reconciliation or were they aimless wanderings and reveling in just feeling a certain way? I know this is possibly a little harsh to think about but I think it's important. It's the difference between being reconciled to illusions and being reconciled to someone living and breathing. There's a big difference there between the two. Jesus offers reconciliation to the original design. You see, Jesus gave up comfort and peace to restore us to the original design. The hands the formed the world were split with metal nails so that things could be restored and reconciled. Jesus isn't offering you comfort and peace. He's offering so much more. He's offering you, personally, reconciliation which includes comfort and peace. Will you receive reconciliation with Jesus? He doesn't want your nice actions and sweet skills. He doesn't want you to read your Bible more or to be a better person. He wants you to be reconciled and restored to the original design. And the original design was that you and him would find life together in the beautiful sips of coffee and hugs with forgiven friends but also in the midst of the seemingly senseless pain of life and miscarriages and days that seem to just fall off the hinges. He also calls you to follow him in restoring others. As you long to be restored, don't you also long for those you love to be restored? Think about the landscape of Jesus' past. What was his most beautiful moment? It was when he gave up his life to bring reconciliation to the original design. He gave up comfort and peace for reconciliation and now he is receiving his reconciliation and his children are coming home to him every day.

We're all afraid of it. Jesus may call us to die to and give up many of our comforts and perhaps some day, all of them. Some he may simply take away suddenly. And I think it's because he knows that our most beautiful moments, just like his most beautiful moment, will be when he leads us to lay down our lives to help others find reconciliation. You can do a lot of things in this life and some may be sweet and comforting, but if you don't live a life of reconciliation then you'll never really find life at all. The beautiful moments, the painful ones, the sacrificial ones, they all find their harmony and life together under the theme of reconciliation with Jesus. Our lives are ones of longing and they always will be. The question is where will you take your longings? Will you be content to simply play in the river or will you go upstream to the source of the river and be reconciled to the one who made you and the place from whence you came?

"But you who were once far off, have been brought near by the blood of Christ." Ephesians 2:13