Peace with everyone. I don't know about you, but I really want it to come easily. I like for everyone to get along and be agreeable. So when conflict arises, I find it frustrating and inconvenient — I simply don't want to do the hard work of sorting through it. At times, I avoid it altogether, choosing to be a peacekeeper instead of a peacemaker. And yet, every time I do, I feel convicted. I know that the pursuit of peace God has called me to is active. As a follower of Christ, I have to be willing to move toward reconciliation. I have to be willing to do something.

Bitterness is one of the most deceptive things a person can carry. It presents itself as strength — as the reasonable, justified refusal to let someone off the hook for what they did. It feels protective, like a wall built to keep you from being hurt again. But over time, bitterness does something no one warns you about when you first pick it up: it stops being about the person who hurt you and starts being about you. It takes root in the soil of your own heart, and everything that grows from that root — your relationships, your outlook, your capacity for joy — begins to taste like it.

There is a difference between forgiveness as an obligation and forgiveness as an overflow. Obligation feels like a demand — something imposed on you from the outside, a standard you are required to meet whether you feel it or not. Overflow feels like something different entirely. It is what happens when you have received so much of something that it naturally, organically begins to spill into everything around you. You are not forcing it. You are not white-knuckling your way through it. It is simply what comes out of a person who has been genuinely, deeply filled.

Jesus was a master storyteller, and He knew that the right story at the right moment could get past every defense a person had built up around a hard truth. In Matthew 18, He tells one of those stories — and it is not subtle. It is meant to land, to sting a little, to hold up a mirror and ask us honestly what we see.

As followers of Christ, we are called to practice a forgiveness that resists limits or conditions. Having received mercy that is unearned, undeserved, and inexhaustible, we are invited to extend that same mercy to everyone we encounter.

There is a story we tell ourselves about who we are. It gets written over time — shaped by our experiences, our failures, our family histories, and the words spoken over us by people who had no idea how long those words would stay. Some of that story is true and worth holding onto. But a lot of it is not — it is a collection of old verdicts, outdated labels, and identities built on the worst things that have happened to us or the worst things we have done. And the trouble is, we often do not even realize we are still living inside a story that has already been rewritten.