The truth is that life is filled with squabbles. That’s just how human beings are. Most of these conflicts concern unimportant things like waffle toppings, but some are far more serious, involving significant personal violations. Alcoholism and drug abuse, infidelities and abusive behaviors carve deep wounds in us, some that we carry all our lives. The tragedy is not just that they happen, but that we let them build up and stay hidden, the little ones as well as the big ones. They create walls that isolate us from those we love and those with whom we would be at least neighborly. They diminish the abundant living that God holds out to us.
This message is adapted from “On Reconciliation” written by Robert Cotton Fite in the May 1998 issue of Lutheran Woman Today (now Gather) magazine.