Midsummer AfterWords | Shalom in Street Clothes

A short read
by Kim Ali

A couple weeks ago, I sat across from someone I used to be close to. Years had passed since we’d spoken. I had recently learned that I’d hurt this friend in ways I hadn’t fully known at the time. And though everything in me wanted to move on—to file it under “we did our best” or “those were complicated years”—I kept feeling this tug: you can’t heal what you won’t face.

So I reached out.

What unfolded in that conversation was both tender and hard. We each held pain from that season—different kinds, shaped by different roles. But for my part, I was able to say some long-overdue words:

“I think I hurt you. I want to understand how. I want to name what I can, even the parts I still can’t see clearly yet.”

There’s a quote by James Finley that has been working on me for the past several months:

“If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love.”

When I first read that, I flinched.

If I’m honest, I want God to protect me from everything. From getting hurt, from hurting others, from ever having to go back and sit in the shame of who I once was. But that’s not what love does.

Love doesn’t protect us from pain; it sustains us in the midst of it. Love doesn’t erase the consequences; it walks us through them. Love doesn’t always stop the breaking, but it stays in the room while we pick up the pieces.

And sometimes, love just sits beside us and weeps—not to fix, but to feel the ache with us.

And when we are grounded in that kind of love—the absolute, sustaining love of God—something shifts. We stop needing to defend our image. We stop clinging to old narratives that keep us “right” and others “wrong.” We can finally afford to be human. We can look someone in the eyes and say, “I see it now, and I’m sorry.”

In our current cultural moment, where retaliation is encouraged, defensiveness is instinctual, and emotional shutdown is often celebrated as maturity, it feels counterintuitive to choose a different way.

It’s countercultural to lean into repair. It’s revolutionary to tell the truth without needing to win. It’s quietly holy to remain curious where you could’ve shut down, or to be present where you could’ve walked away.

We’ve been talking a lot lately at The Parish about Love Lived Out—the kind of love that moves beyond sentiment and into something embodied and real. A love that creates right-relationship. That makes space for healing. That invites shalom—not just peace as the absence of conflict, but wholeness, justice, restoration.

It’s tempting to imagine God’s work of making all things new as something cosmic and far off. But that same Spirit, the One who is always creating and always restoring, doesn’t just operate in the abstract.

She shows up in the most fragile of places: in the quiet decision to make something right with one person, in the choice to revisit a painful moment not to defend or correct, but to open it up to the light.

It may not look impressive. There’s no spotlight, no platform. Just two people, telling the truth to each other, giving the past a chance to breathe, and letting grace enter places that had been sealed off.

This is what shalom looks like in street clothes. This is resurrection in real time. This is a small corner of the world being stitched back together—slowly, quietly, truthfully.

And I’m beginning to believe… this is how all things are made new. Not just through divine decrees, but through divine participation—in us, through us, with us.