As people who believe that all things are being made new, we can recognize—even in the brokenness of failure and in the hurt of people with whom we will never be able to reconcile—that we are not trapped in the worst things we have done. We can be better and are being made whole moment by moment. Reconciliation is in that hope of transformation.

Are we the worst thing we have ever done? Are we lost in the moments of our greatest sin? For some people, the answer isn’t theoretical. We label them by their sin. To our society they will never be more or less than that moment. We cage them and try to retain that moment of guilt, spreading out one instant over decades and reducing a human being to a single act. Our labels strip their humanity and freeze them in time. In our devotion to a false justice and captivity to a false philosophy, we prevent them—and ourselves—from ever seeing reconciliation.

This endless existence in a point in time is diametrically opposed to the work of new creation. What is justice or reconciliation without growth, newness, and the transformation of not just the person but of the society that birthed them? The principalities and powers are terrified that we will truly believe and live into the truth that God “forgave all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.” To maintain power they perpetuate a system where the small gods of our world command our loyalties, and the brutalizing overseer of systemic racism separates us from our siblings in Christ.If only we could see the holy in the mundane, then we might see the face of God in our neighbor.