If Only You Would Start Apologizing

[Jesus excited to see you’re considering accepting literally anyone’s forgiveness.]

Thursday Thoughts Ya’ll. It’s the perfect moment for me to sing a lyrical song of thanksgiving for that ancient grace of Apologizing For Who You Are.

Rachael Hollis says, “Stop apologizing for who you are,” (you can google it) and I say, ‘Don’t knock the personal apology, even the one for just being who you are.’ Truly I spend most of my life apologizing. It’s one of the few things I’m really good at it. And the reason I’m good at it is because I have so much practice. And the reason I have so much practice is because I am wrong so often. Sometimes I am wrong just for where I’m standing. Like, I’m in the way of where someone else is trying to be. ‘I am so so sorry,’ I like to say,

I forgot to get back to you…
I didn’t see you standing there…
I didn’t realize you were up against a deadline and needed that yesterday…
I shouldn’t have been so testy…
I meant to clean that up last week…
I couldn’t find your special socks and wasn’t able to wash them…
I misunderstood what you were talking about…
I didn’t see that paragraph in that email…
I said something I shouldn’t have said…
I was wrong…
I was unkind…
I let you down….
I am so so so sorry…

The great thing about an apology, especially to someone you love and depend on for your daily happiness, is that it tricks you into thinking about that other person for thirty seconds. It is an ineffably small way to increase the affection and care you have for someone else. It takes you out of yourself and makes you anxious about the well being of others. And ultimately, that’s what God wants you to do—to get over yourself for a minute so you can even see another, and more importantly, him.

Of course you can’t do that very well, or at all. Seeing another person, recognizing the greatness of another being besides yourself, cuts to the very heart of the pride that makes you who you are. Pride is the essential quality of being alive. It’s an orientation so deep, so profound, and so wrong, that it blinds each of us utterly to the cosmic reality that God is good.

So God had to take it—that fundamental orientation towards yourself and away from him—onto himself and die and rise again and send the Holy Spirit. God gives you supernatural help to be able to apologize. Every apology is a tiny miracle that makes the world a sweeter, better, kinder, more beautiful place.

If you need permission to do anything, take God’s invitation to apologize for who you are and what you do. I’m sorry, you can say. I wasn’t trying to be bad. I was wrong with no effort at all. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

If you find that apologizing makes you want to choke and die, you just need more practice. You need to Start Apologizing. The more you do it, the easier it is. If you once begin the lifelong habit of apologizing, you will begin to see the importance and beauty of all kinds of other people besides yourself. And ultimately it will become more realistic, though perhaps never easy, to bow your head before the God of the universe and say, ‘I’m sorry, I am wrong, I need help.’ The minute you do that all the barriers and judgment, which you dread so much, are broken and he forgives you. More than that, he takes the very offense onto himself so that you don’t have to worry about it any more.

You don’t even have to be a girl. Whoever you are you can start apologizing. #thursdaythoughts