Over the years, I’ve helped with several reconciliation attempts. Some between extended family members, others between coworkers, a few between husbands and wives. There’s a common thread in almost all of them. They all took longer than I thought they should. One particular family reconciliation effort took about a year and involved many meetings, one-on-one counseling, group counseling, and lots of one-step-forward-two-steps-back action.
I didn’t expect it to take that long. Three months in, I thought we were close. Six months in, I stopped guessing. The moment I let go of any timeframe of my own choosing, a weight lifted. I’d been growing bitter — not because they weren’t listening, but because I was insisting they heal on my schedule. I loved them the whole time, even while I grew begrudged. That’s the strange, complex place a mediator stands in.
This connects to a definition of peacemaking I keep coming back to: disarming evil without destroying the evildoer. Doing that well is a slow, arduous pursuit. A timeframe pressures a mediator to coerce conformity — to shame people into agreement, guilt them into apologizing, using Scripture to get the desired response. That approach might produce something that looks like peace, but it’s false peace, built on shame.
How do you disarm evil without destroying the evildoer?
Here’s one important upfront disclaimer. The reconciliation process described in this article is useful between good-faith individuals who are at odds. If you are faced with a genuine power imbalance, such as abusers, gaslighting, hardcore narcissists, or basically any relational imbalance that demands strict boundaries, this process becomes more nuanced. If you are the victim in a situation like this, you should seek professional help from a therapist, a trusted local pastor, or even law enforcement if the severity to your personal well-being is high enouh. With that said, let’s try to answer the posed question.
First, remember everyone at the table is still sinning. No one here has a perfect track record — most of us would struggle to claim a C average morally. Because everyone is still broken and still being sanctified, everyone owes everyone else grace when something hurtful gets said or done.
Second, remember the devil is in the details. Because this is a biblical reconciliation, the powers of darkness are actively working against it. That’s another reason for more grace, not less — Satan wants to make a bad situation worse.
These two realities alone are enough to sink a reconciliation if you stop taking them seriously partway through. Staying serious about them requires real self-scrutiny — a willingness to hear criticism from the very people you’re at odds with. They may not be entirely right, but they’re rarely entirely wrong either. Take their criticism to Jesus rather than dismissing it as sour grapes. Ask him to show you where your words or actions gave the enemy room to work. Without that humility, the journey will be exactly as long as your pride is deep.
Third, don’t trust your own feelings. Feelings are the most easily manipulated part of being human, which makes them a poor gauge of reality — not irrelevant, just unreliable.
Fourth — and this cuts the other way — don’t discount anyone else’s feelings. You only have permission to scrutinize your own. Everyone else’s is off limits. Feelings are unreliable because of sin, but they’re also part of the imago Dei in us — because God Himself is an emotional being. It’s popular to say God doesn’t care about your feelings; I think that’s phrased poorly. God cares that you have the right feelings — that your heart breaks over what breaks His, that you weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. So the fastest way to destroy someone at the reconciliation table is to call their feelings irrelevant or tell them how they should feel. The only feelings you’re allowed to dismiss are your own. Destroy someone’s feelings, and you’ve destroyed them — that’s the hard part of this work.
One caveat for everyone at the table: people are won over, not dominated. They’re valued, not proven wrong. Hoping for change while still valuing someone is what makes this slow — but caving in isn’t the answer either. Winning someone over means gentle persuasion through words and actions that show the relationship is worth rebuilding.
Fifth, don’t come with a list of demands. Come instead with a spirit of hope and service. A list of demands says you must be served before you’ll offer relationship. This doesn’t mean you skip the airing of grievances — that has to happen. It just has to happen in humility, given and received like a servant, not with defiance. If you show up to serve instead of expecting service, you’ve taken one of the devil’s best weapons off the table.
Sixth, cultivate love. If people are sitting down at all, some love is already at work — stoke it. Love is what disarms evil.
“Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.” — 1 Peter 4:8
Left uncultivated, the sins that brought you to the table will only multiply. Keep love in view. Do loving things for each other, even while it hurts.
This is what I’ve learned about destroying evil without destroying the evildoer — and taking all of it seriously means the journey will always run longer than you’d like. Let it. Elongating the journey with caution beats destroying it with impatience. You won’t always get to be blunt. You won’t get to go for the jugular. Preserving life rarely calls for amputation — it takes surgical precision. A scalpel, not a hatchet.
Consider how patient Jesus has been with your own failures. How often have you deserved a hard word and gotten a gentle one instead? Some people like to say Jesus hits hard sometimes, but compared to what he suffered for us, he’s barely raised his voice. In everything, we should aim to handle each other the way he handles us — which is why it’s worth digging into the Word for what isn’t always obvious on the surface.
I hope this was useful. I’m still growing in this, so some of it might need sharpening, but I wanted to share something good that the LORD has taught me. Hopefully, it does you some good as well.
