Verse of the Day for February 21

Jacob has stolen the blessing and fled. Twenty years later he is coming home and hears that Esau is riding to meet him with four hundred men, which is not a welcome party.

He spends the night in dread. He divides his family into groups so that if one is attacked the other might escape. He sends waves of gifts ahead. He bows to the ground seven times as he approaches.

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

Every part of the reunion Jacob had rehearsed turned out to be unnecessary. The gifts, the strategy, the choreographed bowing — none of it was what Esau had come for.

Twenty years of imagined confrontation, and the actual meeting takes one verse and four verbs, all of them physical, none of them planned.

Reconciliation is often less dramatic than the version we have been carrying, and it is nearly always delayed by the version we have been carrying.

You do not know what the other person has done with those years.