Life Is Short, Eh?

Another tenant in my building has just died.  This is someone I didn't know well, but strangely, I found myself more motivated than usual to be kind and welcoming towards him.  This seems to have happened in recent years between me and individuals who would end up dying soon after.  I have come to feel rather like the Death Watch Cat.  Here's a link if you wish to read the article, Gentle Reader:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/miracle-cat-predicts-deaths-100-5365056

Now, I was just mean to someone in yesterday's post.  I still think he deserves it, but maybe I won't do this again.  What if something bad were to happen to him.  What then?  Yes, he did make some very ignorant and hurtful comments, and perhaps the punishment fits the crime but it isn't really my job to punish an idiot two and a half years after the fact by openly naming and shaming him on these pages.  Though it could also be argued that I am the oppressed party rising up against my oppressor but this could be reargued citing that he is a member of a visible minority while I am a white male.  But I am poor and he is reasonably well off.  Is social oppression colour blind?  I think it can be.

I have just recently reconciled with my next door neighbour.  We have had rather a difficult relationship over the years but in the laundry room the other day we actually started talking to each other and she apologized for something she did last summer and now it's all good.  Life is short.  There is another tenant on my floor who refuses to speak to me.  I have on a couple of occasions called this person on her very rude and inconsiderate behaviour and being a Colombian woman of the older generation she is not about to forgive anyone for showing her up for throwing her selfish actions in her face.  I have some ex-friends and surviving relatives who don't want to be in contact with me and I have to admit to having mixed feelings about them as well.

But life is short.  What if I, or any of them were to suddenly croak, without reconciliation, carrying to the other side this negative baggage that we really could have dealt with here below?  And what about those towards whom I still feel less than forgiving?  I can lie about it and say that as a Christian I love everyone.  Or I could rephrase this a little: as a professing Christian I claim to theoretically love everyone, which is a little bit closer to the truth.

I will, cautiously and slowly, reach out to those whom I know how to contact.  It could be in a few days or in a few years.  It has to feel ready and some are not going to feel ready to hear from someone they have decided to hate, or at least to not be friends with.  If any of these ones were to reach out to me in a spirit of goodwill and reconciliation I think I would welcome them.  This not only is my sense of Christian obligation but I think this could speak of how my Christian orientation has changed and transformed me over the years.

Life is short.  We cannot realistically be all reconciled and some people are not safe to have as frends.  But I think there is a dynamic, a process of reconciling love that can put this reality in motion.  It is called the work of the Holy Spirit, and God, who is love, insomuch as we surrender our hearts to his love will work miracles.

If we will let him.