The Apology He Keeps Rehearsing

It is a good apology. That is the strange part, and it is the part he would find hardest to explain if anybody ever asked, which nobody will, because nobody knows about it.

Tom has been working on it for nineteen years.

It has an opening that does not make excuses. It has a middle where he takes it seriously without going overboard, because going overboard would make it about him. It has an ending that leaves the other person somewhere to go. He has adjusted it over the years the way you adjust anything you keep returning to, and the current version is better than the version he had at thirty, and he is aware that this is an odd thing to be able to say about oneself.

He runs it in the shower sometimes. In the car. Once, memorably, while waiting for a prescription.

He has never delivered it. He is never going to deliver it, and not because he lacks courage. He is not going to deliver it because he did not do anything.

Something was done to him, a long way back, and he was not the one who did it, and that is the entirety of what I am going to say about it, and this article will not ask him or you for one word more.

And he has an apology ready, polished, nineteen years in the making, for an entry that was never on his page.

Let me be exact about who I am writing to, because on this site that comes first.

I am not writing to somebody who did a thing and cannot get the sense of it off. That reader is real and there are articles here written carefully for them and this is not one of them.

I am writing to the person carrying a shame that came out of another person's actions.

And before we go anywhere at all: it was not yours. Nothing about you was a factor, and nothing here is going to circle back and ask you to check that, because there is nothing to check.

East and west have no poles

Here is the verse.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

Now, most people read that as a poetic way of saying a long way, and it is more precise than that.

David could have said north and south. He was a man who lived outdoors and knew his sky. And north and south are measurable, because they have ends. There is a north pole and a south pole, and once you get to one you start going the other way. The distance between them is a real number.

East and west have no such thing. Go east and you keep going east. There is no point at which you begin returning. It is the one axis on the compass with no terminus, and that is why he picked it.

So the removal is not merely great. It is the kind of distance that cannot be traversed back, by anybody, in any direction, ever.

You are separated from what was removed by a distance that has no return leg, and God chose the one axis that could carry that. Psalm 103:12 says east and west rather than north and south on purpose, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written measurement and makes it real in a person, so it does not rest on how far away it feels in the car.

There is a second mercy in the choice of axis, and it is about who does the traveling. A distance with no far end is a distance nobody can be sent back along, and that includes you. Whatever the removal was, it was not a thing put somewhere you could go and retrieve on a bad evening.

You have no road back to it, and the absence of that road is a kindness rather than a locked door. It is written as east from west with no terminus at either end, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written distance into a life, which is why it holds on a night when the whole thing feels close enough to touch.

Whose transgressions

Now the word I want to put in your hand, and it is a pronoun.

He removed our transgressions from us.

Our. Not everyone's. Not whatever is in the room. Not the general weight of things that have gone wrong in a person's life. God is being precise about ownership in that sentence, and He is precise about it everywhere.

Scripture is scrupulous on this point in a way that people rarely are. It has a great deal to say about the sins of a person. It has a great deal to say about the sins committed against a person. It does not confuse the two, ever, and it never once files the second under the first as a convenience.

So when a man has an apology ready, the first question is not whether it is a good apology. It is a good apology. The question is whose entry it answers, and the answer is that it answers an entry that has never once appeared under his name in any book God keeps.

You have been holding an apology for something that is not on your page, and God's own accounting has never had it there. Scripture uses the possessive on purpose and stays exact about whose is whose, and the same Spirit inspiring that line is the one testifying inside a person now.

And I want to say a thing here that gets muddled by well meaning people. Nothing in this waits behind you forgiving anybody. Not on a schedule, not as a condition, not at all. Whatever is between you and the person who acted belongs to you and God at your own pace, and it stands in front of nothing here at all.

I want this in the middle too, in plain sight, said as warmly as I can say it. Getting a person alongside you is part of what God is doing and not a smaller version of it. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor who knows this ground. You do not have to describe anything to make that appointment, and a good one will never ask. And if the nights have gone long, if the rehearsing has grown into something that is eating your evenings, or if the thinking has traveled past the ache and out toward wishing to be gone, call or text 988 or your local crisis line tonight and let a human being be with you in it. None of that is a failure of faith. God has always worked through people.

An apology for an entry not on your page

Now here is the part I would most want said to me, and I want to say it carefully because it can sound like a rebuke and it is the opposite of one.

The apology is not a moral failure. It is not scrupulosity to be scolded out of. It is what a decent person does when they have been handed a weight with no label on it: they look for the only explanation that makes the weight make sense, and the only explanation available to most people is that they must owe something.

That is not a flaw in your character. It is a conclusion drawn honestly from incomplete information, and the missing information is the pronoun.

You are not in debt, and the sense of owing was a reasonable conclusion drawn from a page you were never allowed to read. Psalm 103:12 removes what belongs to a person and stays silent about what does not, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a life.

And I am not going to tell you that you stop running it. I have no right to hand you a date, and if I gave you one and you missed it, you would file that as another failing, and there is nothing here to fail at. Running the apology is not sin.

You are clean right now with the current version still in your head, and the current version gives no evidence about anything. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.