A family member and I have not spoken in years, and nobody even remembers exactly how it started. Do I try, or leave it alone?

“And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.”

Jacob had cheated his brother out of a birthright and run for twenty years, and he came home braced for an army. Instead Esau ran to meet him and threw his arms around his neck. Genesis offers no speech explaining the theology of it, just two men weeping. The reunion did not undo the history, and afterwards they still settled in separate places. It was real anyway, and it began with someone moving first.

“And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation;”

Paul tells the Corinthians that God reconciled us to himself through Christ and then handed the same work over to us. The word he uses carried a diplomatic edge, describing the restoring of relations between estranged parties. He is naming the family business we have been brought into. That means a move toward the other person is not merely decent behaviour, it sits close to the centre of what God is doing.