What if reconciliation takes longer than a lifetime?

We have been exploring the possibility that God's ultimate purpose is reconciliation.

But there is an obvious problem.

Reconciliation often doesn't happen.

People die unreconciled.

A parent and child may remain estranged.

A victim may never receive an apology.

A wrongdoer may never acknowledge what they have done.

Someone may die still consumed by hatred.

Another may die carrying wounds they have never been able to heal.

Some crimes are so terrible that reconciliation during an ordinary human lifetime can seem unimaginable.

If God's purpose really is reconciliation, has God failed?

Perhaps the problem is our timescale.

We naturally think in terms of a human lifetime.

Seventy years.

Eighty years.

Perhaps a hundred.

We expect the great questions of human existence somehow to be resolved within that tiny window.

But why should God's work be limited by our lifespan?

If consciousness continues beyond physical death, then perhaps death isn't the deadline for reconciliation.

Perhaps it is simply a change in the environment in which reconciliation continues.

That would transform the way we think about God's purposes.

Imagine two people separated by terrible harm.

One dies without understanding what they have done.

The other dies still deeply wounded by it.

From our perspective, their story has ended.

They were never reconciled.

But perhaps from God's perspective their story is nowhere near finished.

There is still truth to encounter.

Consequences to understand.

Remorse to develop.

Wounds to heal.

Transformation to start.

Forgiveness to become possible.

Trust, perhaps slowly, to be rebuilt.

And ultimately relationships to be restored.

How long might that take?

We don't know.

Perhaps some reconciliation is comparatively straightforward.

Perhaps other reconciliation takes what, from our perspective, would seem an unimaginably long time.

And perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.

Look at the timescale of creation itself.

The universe has developed over billions of years.

Stars had to form.

Elements had to be forged.

Planets had to develop.

Life emerged.

Conscious beings eventually appeared.

Whatever God's relationship to that process, God doesn't appear to be constrained by our human impatience.

We think in days and years.

God's purposes often unfold across ages.

Perhaps we make a mistake when we imagine the afterlife as though everything must happen immediately:

Death.

Judgment.

Sentence.

Final destination.

What if God's work is much more like a process?

Death
↓
Continued conscious existence
↓
Truth
↓
Understanding
↓
Repentance
↓
Transformation
↓
Healing
↓
Forgiveness
↓
Reconciliation

Different people might move through that process very differently.

Love doesn't need to hurry.

But neither does Love give up.

That distinction matters.

Universal reconciliation doesn't have to mean:

Everyone dies and immediately becomes perfect.

It could mean:

God never stops working towards reconciliation.

For however long it takes.

Think about what that means for the victim.

God doesn't have to say:

“You must forgive this person now.”

Rather,

There is time for healing.

There is time for truth.

There is time for the perpetrator genuinely to become different.

And there is time for forgiveness eventually to become freely possible.

Think also about the wrongdoer.

God doesn't have to choose between two alternatives:

Forgive them without changing them

or

Punish them forever.

There is another possibility:

Transform them.

And transformation may take a very long time.

God's objective isn't to complete everything according to our timetable.

God's objective is to complete the work.

That gives us a very different understanding of hope.

Hope doesn't require us to pretend that every relationship can be repaired in this life.

Some cannot.

Some should not be attempted while a person remains dangerous or unrepentant.

Death may arrive while the work is profoundly unfinished.

But if death doesn't end God's relationship with either person, then death doesn't necessarily end God's work of reconciliation.

Perhaps God has something that we don't have:

Time.

Time for every truth to emerge.

Time for every deception to fall away.

Time for every wound to heal.

Time for every hardened heart to change.

Time for every person to become capable of seeing another completely.

Not forced reconciliation.

Not instant reconciliation.

Not cheap reconciliation.

But patient reconciliation.

However long it takes.

And perhaps that helps us understand the extraordinary scale of Paul's vision:

“through him to reconcile to himself all things” - Colossians 1:20

All things.

That is an enormous undertaking.

Perhaps we shouldn't expect it to fit inside the few decades between our birth and death.

Our earthly lives may be only one part of a much greater journey.

And so perhaps the question isn't:

“Why has God not reconciled everyone yet?”

Perhaps the question is:

“Has God finished?”

And if the fundamental reality really is Love, perhaps the answer is:

Not yet.

Love still has work to do.

And Love has all the time it needs.