Sep. 6, 2026 - When we disagree

There's a story being written in your life right now. Not just the highlight reel — not just the moments you'd post about or brag about at a family dinner — but all of it. The misunderstandings. The hard conversations you've been avoiding. The relationships that didn't turn out the way you hoped, and the ones you're still trying to figure out. Every choice, every word, every way we respond when things get hard — it's all going into that story. So here's the question worth sitting with this week: what are we writing?

Conflict is about as universal as it gets. Doesn't matter how kind you are, how patient you try to be, how carefully you choose your words — sooner or later, conflict finds you. We're human, so we misunderstand each other. We carry different experiences, different passions, different ways of moving through the world, and those differences create friction even when nobody's trying to cause harm. Two people can both care deeply and still end up on opposite sides of something that matters.

So what do we do when that happens?

In Matthew 18, Jesus gives some of the most practical advice in all of scripture about conflict. When someone wrongs you, he says — go to them. Talk to them directly, one on one. Sounds simple enough, right?

And yet. How rarely do we actually do it that way?

Instead, we talk to everyone except the person we need to talk to. We build our case. We avoid the conversation and hope the tension just quietly dissolves on its own (it never does). We wait until we're so frustrated that when we finally say something, it comes out sideways. And honestly, there are good reasons for all of this. We're afraid of how they'll respond. We can't find the words. We're still too hurt to say what we actually mean. Maybe we've already tried, and it went badly.

Jesus doesn't brush past any of that. But he does point us in a direction. Go. Talk to the person. Start there.

Here's something I think gets lost in a lot of conversations about conflict: having the hard conversation, doing the work of honesty and vulnerability — none of it guarantees a particular outcome. Jesus gives us a path toward reconciliation. He never promises reconciliation will actually happen.

Some conflicts don't get resolved. Some relationships don't get repaired. You can apologize with your whole heart and not be forgiven. You can forgive someone who never even asks. You can explain yourself as clearly as you know how and still not be understood. You can do everything within your power and still be left holding something unfinished.

That's not failure. It just isn't. There's a real difference between being faithful and being in control. We're responsible for our part — speaking honestly, listening well, owning the harm we've caused, extending forgiveness when we're able. We are not responsible for managing what someone else does with any of that. Letting go of that weight isn't giving up. It's wisdom.

There's a particular kind of grief that shows up when conflict gets tangled with cognitive decline. So many of us have walked alongside a spouse, a parent, a dear friend as dementia or Alzheimer's slowly reshapes a relationship. The person you love is still there — and yet something has shifted. Memories blur. Reactions change. Someone who was gentle their whole life might become suspicious, or sharp, or afraid. Someone who's known you for decades might not recognize you at all.

In those moments, the usual tools don't really work anymore. You can't sit down and talk through a misunderstanding with someone who can't hold that conversation the way they used to. You can't wait for an apology the other person no longer has the capacity to give.

So what does that ask of us? A real reorientation, I think. Sometimes the most faithful thing isn't proving we're right — it's asking what the other person might actually be experiencing. Underneath the anger or the accusation, there might be someone saying, in the only language they have left: something is happening to me, and I don't understand it. Meeting a person there, instead of meeting them in the conflict itself, might be one of the hardest and most beautiful things love ever asks of us.

And to anyone doing that caregiving work — hear this — none of this means swallowing the pain without naming it. Understanding why something is happening doesn't make it hurt less. Grace has to reach both ways: to the one receiving care, and to the one giving it. Sometimes love looks like staying close. Sometimes it looks like stepping away to breathe, or asking someone else to help carry it for a while.

In Exodus, as the Israelites got ready to leave Egypt and become a people together, God gave them specific practices of remembering. Remember what's been done for you. Remember who you are. Remember you belong to something bigger than yourself.

That kind of remembering matters in conflict too. When we're hurt, our vision narrows. We start seeing the other person only through the lens of what they did, instead of as a whole person. But before they disappointed us, they were a person. Before we made our mistake, we were a person. Before someone became hard to love, they were beloved.

And so were we.

Right in the middle of his teaching on conflict, Jesus says that wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he's there with them. That promise isn't just for Sunday morning. It's for the hard conversations. The strained silences. The moments when you genuinely don't know what to say next.

We are not carrying any of this alone.

So maybe the question to hold onto — whatever conflict or hard relationship you're facing right now — is just this: what would love look like here? Not a perfect resolution. Not a guarantee everything gets repaired. Just the next faithful step. A conversation. A boundary. An act of forgiveness. Or the quiet, hard grace of letting go of something you cannot change.

Every day, in small ways, we're writing something.

May it be a story worth telling.