Reconciling All Things

 

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

 Do you reconcile your checkbook each month? You know, where you go through your records and you match them up to the bank’s? My husband has always been faithful and diligent in this responsibility, but I haven’t always been much of a help. For the vast majority of our relationship, the finances fell squarely into his “to do” list, not because he was hoarding them, but because I was completely unwilling to participate. I tried it for a bit when the kids were young, paying the bills and such, but I got scattered and overwhelmed and missed a few critical deadlines and then decided that finances were not my thing and passed it off to my husband entirely. When I started getting into points and miles about this time last year, however, the finances took on new meaning for me. I saw them as an interesting challenge, a puzzle to solve. How could I eek out a few more trips here and there? What could I cut, what could I reassign? My husband was more than happy to hand over passwords and open the ledgers for my perusal. He was even willing to let me take over the way we pay our bills and lets me be in charge now of reconciling our records with the bank.

 We use a piece of software called Quicken to manage our personal finances. I can’t say that I’m a fan, or that I’d necessarily recommend it, but we haven’t found anything better – if you know of something share it in the comments please! Quicken does the job – sort of. It connects to our financial institutions and downloads the information. Then it tries to be helpful and adds in the categories it thinks we want. We have a lot of accounts – I mean A LOT. My husband thinks this is part of Quicken’s challenge as it tries to sort out transfers made between them and how they should be accounted for. Unfortunately, often times it puts the wrong account on a transaction or even doubles the transactions, putting them in twice, sometimes into different accounts. One transfer between my travel savings account and our primary checking account might end up being that plus a transfer from our money market to our checking. Next thing you know, none of the balances match to what the bank has! So, each week, I set aside one evening to reconcile it all. I go through first and make sure that the categories assigned to each transaction are correct. Was this purchase at Amazon actually a Christmas gift or should it be categorized as pharmacy? Did we buy groceries at Costco, or was this a gas purchase? Once everything seems to be in order, then I open each account and see if our balance matches the bank’s. Sometimes it does, often times it doesn’t. Then the hunt is on. Is it a missing transaction? A doubled one? Sometimes it’s simple. The balance is off by $146.15 and thre is an incorrect debit for $146.15. More often a transaction is incorrectly attributed to a different account and it’s total is doubled or tripled by the misalignment. It’s been really good work for my brain!

 What does any of this have to do with our verses for today? In them it talks about how Jesus reconciled all things to Himself through His shed blood on the cross. Jesus took on the massive job of reconciling all the transactions of our lives, having them match up with His. I don’t know about you, but there are a lot of things in my life that I have automatically categorized as “bad.” Just like Quicken, something comes my way and I plop it into the “awful” category. But Jesus looks at it and says what Joseph did in Genesis 50:20, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good.”

 One of the biggest examples of this in my life is my health. Some people look at my circumstances – the EDS, the brain tumor, Lyme Disease – and say that I am cursed, forsaken. They feel badly for me. How could anything this awful actually be good? With God, that’s how. One of the major blessings that has come through this is in my marriage. For much, if not most of it, we struggled to get along. There were fights and misunderstandings, pointed silences and horrible bouts of weeping. Not all the time of course, but enough of it. I prayed and prayed and prayed. I bet my husband did too. I asked God to heal and bless my union with my husband. It hadn’t started out on the right foot, and that had gotten it into some pretty messed up, dark places. But I trusted that if anyone could make it all right, God could, and my trust wasn’t in vain. Something about my illness actually brought us together. The sicker I got, the closer we got. When I was in the neuro ICU for two weeks may have been our closest time as a husband and wife, a time where we were at peace together, facing the future as one. And it wasn’t just because my husband woke up and realized what a gem he had in me when he almost lost me 😂. No, illness humbled me. It opened my eyes to pride and other issues that I had been harboring that had kept us apart. It simplified things and brought what was truly important into focus. Turns out my husband can actually be beautifully nurturing, he just hadn’t had the opportunity to practice it when I jumped in and served as the nurturer all the time. In this dark and terrible season, an incredible joy and blessing was birthed, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the health in the world! God took something I had accounted for as “bad” and he reconciled it to Himself as “good.”

Here's the Thing: When we get to heaven, I trust that all of this will make sense. I believe in my heart of hearts that even the awful atrocities will be made beautiful in His perfect plan. But I pray with the psalmist, “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.” [Psa 27:13 NIV]

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