Reconciliation

I’ve been thinking a lot about reconciliation lately. 

Back in the olden days, I wrote a lot of checks, I had a check register, and every month, I would reconcile my records with the statement I got from the  bank. This ensured that the bank and I lived in the same reality with respect to how much money I had.

The bank was always right, because somewhere along the way, I would manage to transpose two numbers, misalign a number that was in the “tens” with one in the “hundreds,” or add a withdrawal. Sometimes this process led to me discovering that I had more money than I thought and other times, less.

If I never took the time to reconcile these numbers, then over time, the discrepancies had the potential to wreak havoc in my life.

As I look around the world today, I feel the havoc that is wrought when reconciliation never happens. Two sides, each having made mistakes, refuse to sit down and go through the receipts.

Reconciliation can only come from a place of humility, of accepting the possibility that we could have made mistakes, of owning those mistakes and seeking to make amends.

Balancing a checkbook is not submitting to the authority of the bank, reconciliation is not submission, rather it is seeking to understand and desire the truth. Going through the receipts, and over the math, and finding that one transposed number is crucial to moving forward in unity and helps us to not make the same mistakes in the future. 

Reconciliation requires honest accounting. 

Reconciliation is about seeking the truth, even if it hurts…especially when it hurts. Knowing about and correcting our mistakes keeps us out of debt; this is confession and repentance.

Friends, for reconciliation to be possible, we need to agree on what is true; but therein lies our challenge. At some point we began to “agree to disagree” on what is factual. We stopped reconciling our accounts and now we find ourselves at a point where our numbers are wildly off and we don’t trust each other's receipts.

I don’t know how we can be reconciled if we cannot agree on the facts. We can agree to disagree on opinions, but not on facts. Where does that leave us?

There are days that I worry that it is too late, but I don’t believe that’s true. 

For reconciliation to be possible, we must stop seeing our neighbors as our enemies. We need to listen, not to influencers, media personalities, and politicians, but we need to sit and listen to one another. Ask questions. Truly listen.

Our conversations need to move beyond talking points, which only end honest dialogue. We need to share our own stories and speak from our own experiences.

We need to go out into the world and meet people who are different from us and not assume we know anything about them because of something we heard from someone else. Read books.

I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s going to be hard, but the alternative is much worse. We cannot keep going down the road we’re on. I hope that’s something we can all agree on.