Isn’t it amazing what can be learned simply in connecting with people? For a long time I’ve been fascinated by people who would prefer to gaslight individuals than reconcile with them. Avoiding reconciling requires a heart that is happier leaving damage as it is than being an instrument of peace.
There’s a particular nuance of gaslighting that goes like this: “I didn’t attempt to reach out because they were ‘offended’ and only they can deal with that.”
Interesting when this is set in the specific context of a wrong done, where ‘the offence’ is precisely located as something done by the person in question. This person would rather cast the person away from a healing they could help with — if only they acknowledged the wrong with contribution. But they retain control over the relationship and prefer to keep them cast off and gaslit.
So much damage is done not in the initial wrongdoing, but in the refusal to attempt to reconcile through the simple and plain acknowledgement of one’s contribution. In the direct refusal to “first go and be reconciled” a person shows themselves as an unsafe person; a person incapable of genuine relationship.
Such a person will inevitably have relationships of two kinds: 1) those that only last a few years before something fractures the bond two share, and 2) those where others are prepared to accommodate their lack of humility and go without their being contrite.
Where a person consistently views those they hurt as ‘the offended’, as if the other person has the weakness and can’t be reasoned with, they cast all wrong onto others, as if they never personally do anything wrong. By character, they do not apologise.
Now, what complicates this is there are people who are too easily offended and who don’t bear the capacity for safe relationship themselves. They are difficult and can even prove impossible to reconcile with.
Same with those we reconcile with and apply boundaries. Reconciliation doesn’t always mean going back to how things were.
But this article is positioned in the context of a person seeing everyone hurt by them as the difficult, impossible one. It’s too easy to cast everyone aside and refuse to go and attempt to reconcile.
The heart of what Jesus is saying in “first go and be reconciled” is relational justice and peace matter more to God than anything, more even than our sacrifices, of service, of our gifting, of our leadership, of everything else we do.
Character matters. The biblical ‘qualifications’ of leaders don’t speak much in terms of skills. They’re almost always a positioning of a person’s character — not what they do or can do, but WHO they are.
It’s not good enough that a person with power gaslights others by suggesting they’re too hard to reason with. It’s a cop out, and their refusal to enter into dialogue casts the other person into a place where forgiveness is harder than it needs to be or should be.
It’s not good enough that a person says, “I’m sorry IF you feel hurt by what I did,” because the word “but” underpins their heart. They minimise any wrongdoing they may have done, they do not learn what they could learn, and they leave the other person locked in a place where they continue being unacknowledged and misunderstood.
Those who care for their relationships will “as far as it is possible, as much as it depends on them, live at peace with others.”
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