The Power of Reconciliation

The last couple weeks have been really, really hard--both on campus in my personal life. So the Lord was good to give me this story last week to encourage me.

I was meeting with a sophomore woman for the first time who was talking about how difficult this semester had been for her faith-wise. She was taking a class that made her question a lot of things and she had lost that emotional connection to the Lord. She had come to the point where she was intellectually doubting her faith and God seemed to have abandoned her--if He existed at all.

She was at our large group meeting in early November when I was speaking on Jesus commands regarding anger and reconciliation. As I spoke she realized that a high school relationship that had gone really, really bad had never really been cleaned up. Her former friend was at UNC, and she knew that she needed to go and be reconciled to her that night. She left the large group meeting and went and talked with her friend.

"It was really good," she told me. "It's not like we're best friends or anything, but it was cleansing and relieving to really close that out. The best part is that as soon as that was done, I had a real sense of God's presence in my life again. That un-reconciled relationship in my life was blocking my experience of God's work in my life and I didn't even know it!"

I'm not saying that everytime we struggle that it's because of sin in our lives. But I do think that struggles in our lives MIGHT be connected to sin in our lives. As grace-driven evangelicals (of which I'm a proud, card-carrying member most days) we often under-sell the effects of sin and miss out on the gracious and wonderful experience of repentance and healing that happens when we actually deal with sin.

And Jesus has particularly strong things to say about the value of being reconciled with one another. Got someone you need to be reconciled to? Jesus says to go and do it, even if it involves a long journey, then come and worship. I'll be praying that my Piebald Life friends will be reconciled in their relationships this Christmas...