Dear Inner Circle,
What does it mean to reconcile?
The word itself feels heavy in the mouth. As though it already knows something difficult is coming, that the work of repair requires the fortitude and grace missing in rupture. Reconciliation asks us to see the separation of ‘us and them’ for what it truly is and always has been: an illusion.
That illusion has shaped nations, including our own.
Two days ago was National Sorry Day, marking the moment in 1997 when Australians were first invited to say sorry to the Stolen Generations. Sorry for the children taken, the families shattered, and the cultures suppressed.
We know now that trauma carries a genetic weight, passed down through generations, its echo still felt. We marked the day and we mourned it, and from that mourning, we carry hope into this Reconciliation Week that we will write a better story in our times.
I have sat with enough pain over the years to know that reconciliation in any form, in any relationship, is among the most demanding things a human being can attempt. It requires the injured party to risk being hurt again. It requires the one who caused harm to surrender their own comfortable story about themselves. Both must stand in the same space and agree that something matters enough to be repaired.
We see reconciliations of all kinds happen here every day. Sometimes it looks like a conversation between brothers after years of silence, between parents and children, between present and past.
There is a third position reconciliation quietly asks us to consider. Not the one who inflicted the wound, nor the one who received it — but the one who simply walked into a world already shaped by both. Who benefitted from systems they didn’t design, opportunities they didn’t question, a belonging they never had to fight for. Reconciliation doesn’t ask that person to carry guilt for what they didn’t do. It asks something smaller and harder: honesty about what they received.
One of the great temptations in life is to separate ourselves into categories. Good people and bad people. Deserving and undeserving. Us and them.
Today we recommit to dismantling those partitions, letting love be the thing that dares to cross the line between us — and then, slowly, dissolving the line altogether.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
