The Day We Didn’t Argue
We love each other because He loved us first. — 1 John 4:19 (NLT)
This past weekend, something rare happened. My youngest daughter and I spent half a day together, and we did not argue once. Not a raised voice, not one of those long silences in the car, not a single exchange that starts out being about getting her help and ends up somewhere neither of us meant to go. The last time we managed that, she was still in high school, roughly five years ago. Before we said goodbye, we made plans to do it again soon.
I would love to tell you what shifted in her. That version is cleaner, and it lets me off the hook. But nothing shifted in her. I could not even tell you when things first turned contentious between us, or why; it built the way weather builds, a season at a time, until it was simply the climate we lived in. Somewhere across twenty-two years I had stopped seeing my daughter and started seeing a file. Every disagreement, every closed door, every conversation that went sideways, all of it stacked up and quietly consulted before she ever opened her mouth. I had even made peace with the arrangement. I told myself I had accepted how things were between us, when what I had actually done was give up and find a kinder word for it.
What changed is that I stopped reading the file and started looking at her something like the way God has always looked at me. We spend much of our Christian life thinking about the vertical part of it: how to serve God better, pray more honestly, obey more consistently. All those matters. But John writes a sentence that quietly reorders the whole thing: we love each other because he loved us first. Notice the direction. Loving people is not a second assignment we take on to prove we are serious about the first one. It runs downhill. It comes from having been loved before we had earned it, and it can only travel as far as we have actually let that love reach us. When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, He gave two. Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, and He said the second was equally important (see Matthew 22:37–39). Not a lesser errand. The same water, still moving.
Which means what was happening between my daughter and me was never really a parenting problem. It was a reading of what I believed about myself. If somewhere underneath it all I picture God keeping a file on me, checking the record before deciding how warm to be, then I will run that same ledger on everyone else, and I will run it hardest on the people I have known longest. The thickest files belong to the people closest to us. They are the ones we stopped being curious about years ago, because we are certain there is nothing left to learn. Paul said it to the church plainly: “Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4:32) It is that last clause carrying the weight. The measure was never what the other person has earned. It is what we have already received.
I do not have a repaired relationship to hand you. I have one afternoon, and plans for another. But I am starting to think this is how most of it actually goes. Not a dramatic reconciliation. Just a decision to set the record down and look again at someone we are sure we already know. There is probably a person like that in your life. You could describe them in a single sentence. The sentence would be mostly accurate, and it would still miss them entirely. Before you weigh whether they have earned a second look from you, it may be worth sitting a while with how you have been looked at.
Who have you quietly filed away, and what would it take to look at them without first consulting the record? Where might the way you treat the people closest to you be revealing what you believe about how God treats you?
My prayer is for us to be thankful that the Father loves us long before we give Him a reason to. Forgive us for the records we keep on the people closest to us, and for calling it acceptance when it was really surrender. Teach us to look at others the way You have looked at us; without the file, without the ledger, with room to begin again. Let what we have received from You be what others receive from us. Amen.