To this day, however, I remember the wisdom of a mere boy’s response to a prospective employer when asked his greatest skill:

“I can sleep on windy nights.”

Unimpressive, unimpressive that is, until one feels the cold winds blow across the barnyard, and hears shutters and doors crashing, sees the unsecured property tumbling across the yard, stores suddenly exposed to the elements, livestock startled and scared, pushing and pressing against unlocked pens. To be able to sleep the sleep of the righteous when everybody whose work isn’t done launches into a panic is impressive to me, indeed.

I don’t mind admitting that my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of temperament makes it easy to put off until the last minute critical resolutions. I constantly guard against the temptation to let things work themselves out. Some people never get the chance to do that.

So, I was more than warmed by the story of family reconciliation after years of cold separation told by our friend and colleague, Dr. Jerome Hurst of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It started with a 17 year-old boy who sought to know Jesus for himself.

As members of Hurst’s church distributed magazines and books in a grocery store parking lot, they were shooed off the property—you know how ya’ll are whenever someone tries to “share.” I digress. It was in that moment that this 17 year-old African American boy, asked the question, “Who is this Jesus I hear people talking about?”

After a conversation, and a meetup, this boy—in 2022—commits to studying the Bible to find “this Jesus,” and then decides he wants to follow Him. The young man resolved to being in the next baptism and naturally, he wanted his family there to see it. He invited his mother, aunt, and two sisters, but you know how ya’ll are when mother has beef with her sister, and we’re all beefin’ and no one is showing up for each other.

Sure enough, acting on the laws of polarity, rather than the bonds of relationship, mother and her sister repelled each other’s presence, and mother walked out. That’s when one of the Bible teachers that had studied with the young man stopped her—not to give a Bible study—but to teach in that moment two critical points:

1. We show up for each other. Period.
2. Now is the time to make that happen.

You know that moment—when suddenly, you realize what you have lost in the conflict with a loved one? And, for once, you see them again as the loved one you once knew, or the friend just as surely knit to your heart? The moment when in crystal clarity, you realize that you can actually live in this world together. Or, at least you wouldn’t want to live in this world without them? To stand in good stead, you would trade it all, hard feelings, history, and all the water under the bridge.

“Reconciliation has much to do with transformation,” Hurst told us. “It’s the moving from a place of separation, hurt, and brokenness to a place of healing, wholeness, forgiveness, and reunion.”

I’ll let Hurst finish the story in his own words.

“The whole message of the Gospel is one of reconciliation: A people who sinned over and over against God were given Jesus to believe in, model after, and follow, so that in their faith and following they could uncover their path back to God and full unity.”