You know what you should do.
You have always known.
This is the problem. Not the not-knowing. The knowing.
I teach forgiveness. I have taught it for years. I know every text. Every story. I have given entire sessions on how to forgive — the mechanics of it, the theology of it, the necessity of it. I know every argument for why holding onto anger destroys the one who holds it.
I know all of this.
My brother and I haven’t spoken in three years.
It started with money. A small amount. Then words. Then silence growing the way mold grows — you don’t notice it, and then one day the whole wall is covered.
People have a name for what we were doing. The silent treatment. It sounds petty when you say it like that. Two grown men. Brothers. Giving each other the silent treatment for three years. But that is what it was.
I never stopped knowing what I should do.
I just didn’t do it.
My wife said: you gave a lecture on forgiveness last week.
I said: yes.
She said: when are you going to forgive your brother?
I said: that’s different.
She said: how?
I said: I was teaching general principles. This is personal.
She looked at me. She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t need to.
The comfortable place is ideas.
Ideas don’t ask anything from you. You can hold an idea about how to apologize and never apologize to anyone. The idea sits there, beautiful, clean, untouched. You can take it out and show people. Look. I know how to apologize. Look how well I understand it.
The understanding costs nothing.
The phone call costs everything.
My son is eight years old. He asked me: Abba, why haven’t you seen Uncle?
I said: we’re both busy.
He said: are you fighting?
I said: we had a disagreement.
He said: can’t you just say sorry?
Children don’t understand complicated things. This is what we tell ourselves. But maybe children only fail to understand our excuses. The thing itself — the actual thing — they see clearly.
Can’t you just say sorry.
Yes. I can. That’s the whole problem. I can. And I don’t.
My father said: you’re the one who knows better. You’re the one who teaches this. You’re the one who has no excuse.
I wanted to argue. I couldn’t.
He was right.
Ignorance is a shelter. You can stand inside it. You didn’t know. How could you be blamed for what you didn’t know.
But I knew. I knew precisely. Every argument, every text, every reason. All of it sitting in my head, perfectly organized, completely useless.
People search for relationship advice when they don’t know what to do. I had no such excuse. I knew exactly what to do. I had told other people what to do. I had watched them do it. I just wouldn’t do it myself.
Knowledge without the action is not knowledge. It is decoration.
I kept teaching. Week after week. Beautiful words. The students wrote things down. Some of them cried. They told me afterward: this changed something in me. Thank you.
I smiled. I went home. I didn’t call my brother.
Once, I sat down to write. An apology letter. I thought maybe that would be easier — words on a page, time to choose them carefully, no voice breaking at the wrong moment. I wrote three sentences. Then I closed the notebook. The apology letter sat unfinished in a drawer for six months. Then I threw it away.
One night I stopped in the middle of a class.
I looked at the faces in front of me.
I said: I have to tell you something. I have been teaching you about how to forgive, and about how to apologize, and about why we must do both. My own brother and I haven’t spoken in three years. I know every reason why this is wrong. I know every text about it. I know it is poison. I know it is pointless. I am telling you this because I don’t want you to do what I have done. Don’t let the knowing become a replacement for the doing.
Silence.
A student came to me after. She said: most teachers pretend they have already won every battle they teach about.
I said: I’m not sure honesty is enough.
She said: maybe confession is preparation for courage.
I went home. I thought about that. Maybe. Maybe not.
I still didn’t call.
This is the honest thing: I was afraid.
Not of him rejecting me. Not of the awkward first words. I was afraid of what it would mean. Three years of silence — if I call now, that silence becomes real. It becomes something that happened. Something I chose. Every day I didn’t call was a day I could still tell myself I was about to.
What we had was no longer just a sibling conflict over borrowed money and careless words. It had become family estrangement. Quiet. Official. Permanent-feeling. The kind that at some point stops being about the original wound and starts being its own thing.
If I call, the story ends.
Or begins. I didn’t know which one scared me more.
My father called in the morning.
He said: your brother asked about you.
I said: he did?
He said: he wants to talk. He’s afraid you won’t.
I said: I’m afraid he won’t.
He said: so you’re both afraid. Both waiting. Which one of you has spent more time studying how to apologize?
He hung up.
I sat with the phone.
There is nothing complicated here. There is a number. There is a call button. There is a brother on the other side who is also sitting somewhere, also afraid, also waiting.
All my years of study. All the texts. All the lectures. All the students who told me I changed something in them.
And I am sitting here, afraid to press a button.
I pressed it.
It rang.
He said: hello?
I said: it’s me.
Silence. Long enough that I thought maybe this was a mistake.
Then he said: I was hoping you’d call.
We talked for an hour. The first ten minutes were stiff. Like two people wearing clothes that don’t fit. Then something loosened. An old joke. A shared memory. His voice the same as it always was.
When we hung up, I sat in the dark for a while.
Not because I had learned something.
Not because some wall had fallen and light came flooding in.
Just because it was quiet, and the quiet felt different than it had an hour before.
Here is the only thing I know now that I didn’t know before:
Nothing.
I knew it all already. Every bit of it. The whole time.
The call wasn’t an insight. It wasn’t a transformation. It was just a call. Twelve digits. A few seconds of ringing.
Three years ended by something I could have done on any afternoon of those three years. I knew how to apologize the entire time. I had taught it. I had written about it. I had watched other people do it and felt moved.
I just hadn’t done it.
My son came to find me. He said: did you talk to Uncle?
I said: yes.
He said: good. Was it hard?
I said: yes.
He thought about this. Then he said: but now it’s done.
Yes.
Now it’s done.
I still teach forgiveness.
I don’t know if I’m any better at it than I was. The next hard thing will come. I will probably hesitate again. I will probably know exactly what I should do and find a hundred reasons to wait.
The gap between knowing and doing — I don’t think it ever closes permanently.
You just cross it. Once. And then you cross it again.
And again.
Each time from the beginning.