Are you Team Puma or Team Adidas?
That might seem like a silly question, but for the people of Herzogenaurach, Germany, this was an existential query.
In the mid-twentieth century, two brothers—Rudi and Adolph Dassler—had a falling out. Once partners in the successful Geda shoe company they had started together, something happened that ripped apart both their relationship and the town that provided much of their company’s workforce.
Angry and bitter, the two brothers literally split the town apart.
Rudi began the Puma shoe company, and Adolph built Adidas. The townspeople divided into two sides based on who they worked for, which affected who they socialized with, where they shopped, and which soccer team they cheered for.
Herzogenaurach gained the sad moniker “the town of bent necks,” referring to everyone’s downward gaze to see what shoes people wore, determining whether they were friends or foes.
Rudi and Adolph never reconciled. They are even buried at opposite ends of their hometown cemetery.
This “shoe-gate” seems unbelievably childish, doesn’t it? After all, both men made lots of money and were deemed “successful.”
But what good are the coolest shoes and lots of cash if your family and town are torn and bent so regrettably?
Is there a Rudi or Adolph in your life?
Is there a fractured relationship impacting you and others around you? How do we move toward reconciling broken relationships so that we don’t live the “good life” only to be buried with regrets and leave behind the reverberating ripples of stubbornness or unresolved interpersonal rot?
In his book Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf, who lived through the calamitous brokenness caused by the 1990s war between Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, speaks of a key factor in this process of reconciliation: the will to embrace the other. It may sound trite and too simple, but Volf is telling the truth: if you want reconciled relationships, you must want it.
If we want the divorce, the fight, or vengeance, if we desire to suckle on the poison of unforgiveness, we will get what we want and have to live with the desserts thereof.
But, if we want to know freedom, healing, and restoration, if we want to know peace and to live with ourselves, even if we can never fully live with the other party like we once did, we’re going to have to want it.
The principle that you hit the target you aim at is not wrong.
The good news is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ restores peace, transforms the will, and helps our aim.
The principle that you hit the target you aim at is not wrong.
Not only does God in Christ willingly heal the broken relationship with Him we caused by the immensity and ugliness of our sin, but He also moves us toward healing with others (2 Corinthians 5:11-21). To be Christian is to come to peace with our Creator and be invited into the beautiful and difficult work of reconciling what is fractured.
In Matthew 5:23-24 Jesus says, “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come an offer your gift.”
Healing broken relationships begins in us and in God’s presence. At peace and humbled before Him, I can ask self-reflective questions and pay attention to what the Spirit is saying as I approach the God from whom I need forgiveness. In humility and gratitude in God’s presence, my will can be moved to transformational, challenging, and beautiful things!
Wholeness and restoration are not merely good ideas for therapeutic well-being; they are the will of God for us and inseparable from the life of worship. When the will is moved to heal broken relationships, it is good news, not just for ourselves and the person I need to be restored with but for a community and society as a whole. A society with a will to embrace will be a society in which people find joy.
We all experience wrongs others commit, from the slightest offense to the most grievous crimes. It’s not if we will experience the reality of broken relationships, but when.
And—admit it—we will all also contribute to the pain others live with as well.
Reconciling broken relationships is a process. Come into God’s presence. Then go willingly, gently, and courageously—with whatever shoes you are wearing—to whom the Spirit leads.
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