The Right Amount Of Sorry

You have been writing this apology since Tuesday and it now has versions.

Version one was in the car. It was short and it was honest and by the time you got to the roundabout you had thrown it out, because it sounded like a man explaining. So you started again at the lights and you took the explaining out, and the second one was better, and then somewhere near the shops you realized it still had that phrase in it, the one that quietly puts a bit of the blame back on the year you have had, so out that went too.

Version four is where the additions began. Because it occurred to you that a real apology would name the part you have not named yet. So you named it. And that felt closer. And that gave you the rule you have been working to ever since, which is that if the new one hurts more than the last one, the new one is more likely to be true.

So it has been getting worse on purpose. And when you finally knelt down last night by the bed, what you had ready was four sentences of self accusation you have polished for six days, and you got about eleven words into it before you stopped.

You stopped because you could not tell whether you meant it.

That is the wall, and you have been standing at it all week. Somewhere behind all this drafting is a scale, and it has a line on it, and you have decided that below the line God is not obliged to take you seriously. So you keep adding weight. More detail, more shame, more of the small things, a slower voice, later at night, on the floor instead of the bed.

And you cannot get the needle to move. It never once moves. You just get tired, and slightly further from meaning it, and you promise yourself a proper go at it tomorrow when you are less distracted.

Meanwhile the thing you actually needed help with has been sitting there untouched for six days, waiting for you to feel correctly about it first.

Nobody set that entry fee

Let me tell you what happened in a temple to a man who did not draft anything. You are not being weighed tonight, and I do not say that to be kind: Luke 18:13 puts a man in the doorway with no version two, no polish, no inventory of anything, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to keep his seven words in the book for two thousand years exactly as he blurted them.

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.Luke 18:13

Seven words. He did not name the specific thing. He did not grade himself. He did not compare this attempt with the attempt he made a fortnight ago, and there is no evidence anywhere in the passage that he was satisfied with how it came out. He hit his chest, he got the sentence out, and he went home.

And the next verse is the part that undoes the whole scale: he went down to his house justified, rather than the other one, the one who had done the work and could prove it.

Now hold the two men side by side, because the difference is not what most people think it is. The Pharisee was not damned for keeping a good record. His record may well have been accurate. He was standing there because his record had become the thing he was standing on. And the man in the doorway had no record and no draft and no confidence at all in his own sincerity, and it made no difference whatever to what he went home with.

You have been drafting because somewhere in you there is a threshold, and the threshold has a number on it. Scripture never once posts that number, and Romans 5:8 has God moving toward people while they were still in it, still unimproved, still mid sentence, and the Spirit of God does not audit an apology for tonnage before He gets involved.

So take the order and hold on to it, because the order is everything in this category. The rescue comes first. Titus 3:5 says it was never by works of righteousness that we have done, and the Spirit who inspired that put the mercy first in the sentence and left the doing out of the qualification altogether. You were not asked to arrive clean.

And now the other half, and it matters just as much, because a house that only says the first half raises people who never get well. The cleaning is real. It is not optional and it is not decorative. 1 John 1:9 has a God who forgives and then cleanses, in that order, and the Spirit is the one who does the cleansing rather than you, and you have a repair coming that is His work and not your entrance fee.

There is a difference between a wash and a toll booth, and everything in your week has depended on confusing the two. The wash comes after the door. It always did. A man gets taken out of the water first and dried off afterwards, and the drying is not something done in the water in order to earn the boat.

And one plain thing, put here because a person who has spent six days deciding they are not sorry enough is a person I want to slow down beside. If any part of this week has included thoughts of ending your life, or of the world being simpler without you in it, tell one living human being before you go to sleep tonight. In the United States, 988 answers, by phone and by text. Anywhere else, emergency services or the crisis line for your country. That is not faith failing and it is not you being too much for somebody. God hands real rescue to people with hands and phone numbers, on purpose, and reaching for one of them is obedience, not defeat.