Settlement Before Sundown

Have you ever walked out of your way to avoid speaking to someone? If you have, no doubt you remember that you weren’t quite comfortable. The more people you feel you have to avoid, the more ill at ease you are. The more unsettled differences you have, the fewer places you feel free to go. IF you have an unsettled quarrel with a neighbor, you probably feel uncomfortable and self-conscious in passing his place. If you have an unsettled misunderstanding with someone in your own family, you don’t feel as comfortable in the same house as you could. A man with an unsettled quarrel is never quite at ease inside, and a man who isn’t at ease inside cannot do his best work. In other words, our feelings against others cramp our own activities. And for this reason, and for many others, a quick and fair clearing of the atmosphere is so much to be preferred to dragging out differences. Paul the Apostle said, “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” Certainly we’d all be happier if each day’s differences could be settled by sundown—because this business of brooding, this fermenting inside, is a deadly killer of human happiness. Sometimes people foolishly go along for years avoiding one another. Their estrangement may date back to some almost forgotten offense. But they have persisted so long in injured silence that it is embarrassing for either to break it. But the best way to settle a misunderstanding is to settle it—even at the price of a little pride—even if we don’t feel that we were at fault—even if it isn’t rightly our place to make the first move. It may be worth swallowing just a little pride to have a load lifted off our minds, because everyone is cramped and uncomfortable in the presence of unreconciled enemies. And making the first move isn’t always altogether a question of being magnanimous. It may be simply a question of being sensible. It is in our own interest to have misunderstandings cleared up, so that we can be at ease in our own home, in our own town, in our own thoughts—and not have to dodge and duck and feel that there are people we’d rather not meet face to face. There is much to be said for settlement before sundown.