sorry – Aspirational Adventures

My beautiful dipstick dog stuck under the throw

Yes I know one picture is from the other day but I thought you’d like to see the sequence

I think the dog forgave the throw for capturing him but I’m not sure. As the “kind” dog-mummy I am I did make him wait for his release until I had taken the first photo.

This is a follow on from my post the other day looking at Sorry. Please, if you haven’t read Beth’s comments about what they get up to at her kindergarten with their children around forgiveness/sorry do go back to read them. They are awesome. I wish I’d done that with my children when they were little

As I’ve said before there are times when God/The Universe just keep highlighting things and this is what has happened with the Sorry/Forgiveness things. I was watching The Way on BBC iplayer the other day and there is a part towards the end where one character says to the other – “I forgive you” and the response is “But I didn’t say sorry”. [I won’t tell you who says what to who because you might want to watch it. Be warned the link has spoiler alerts!]

What stuck me in following on from that previous Sorry post is that it is the forgiving that releases us rather than the saying sorry. The forgiver is able to let go, to move on, and to find their own direction. It doesn’t need someone to say “Sorry” for each of us to be able to forgive.

As happened on the Cross Jesus says “Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” Luke 23:34 [which is actually quite similar to the thing the one character does to the other. She thinks she was doing a good thing but he did not see it that way] Jesus didn’t wait until the people who crucified him said they were sorry. And it is possible some of them never were sorry because they did not see what they had done was wrong.

As with Beth’s children it is not about saying Sorry and moving on but about the child who has been hurt being able to say what they need to make them feel better.

Within the context of the TV program she had said and done things along the way that had help restore his self-worth, had given him the things that made him feel better for the slight that had been committed.

As with all things we have to slow down, to understand what our hurts are and what would make us feel better. As I heard on Drew Jackson’s podcast about Poetry as a Spiritual Practice often anger can be the surface emotion to something much deeper. But we do have to slow down to be able to really find that – whether that be through poetry, free writing which is my go-to, prayer, long walks, or whatever – find that thing that helps us explore deeper what we are really feeling and what will make us feel restored.

Say You’re Sorry

My dog on our local beach back in Feb 2018. When Google photos showed me this memory I had to say sorry for moaning about it being a wee bit windy and chilly today. Definitely not as cold as it was 6 years ago!

Not sure if you had it when you were a kid but I know I did and I know I did the same with my children – “Say sorry” and then “tell them you forgive them” followed by “now go and play together nicely”. As if the perpetrator saying sorry made things alright and the one who had had wrong done to them just had to accept that.

In a book I was reading recently this young couple go from hating each other to not being able to get enough of each other when both say sorry and accept the others apology and forgive them. But I also have a friend who was in a bad accident in which he over took three cars and then hit a tractor that was the lead vehicle which was turning right. Either the tractor was not indicating or my friend did not see the indicator. As he says the road was long and safe for the overtake he just did not think the tractor was going to turn. So yes he was in the wrong and has apologized but the person he hit, he feels, has been antagonised by his apology. The tractor driver’s response has upset my friend greatly.

My friend is very genuine in his apology but I think the person he ran into was so badly shaken by the accident that he is not yet in a place to accept the apology.

I do wonder if, especially as Christians, we think that if we say sorry that will ease the situation but sometimes it makes it worse. I don’t know the driver of the tractor but I wonder if he’s thinking “it might be ok for you to be sorry but I could have had your death on my conscious for the rest of my life. And also I’ve now got to wait for the insurance company to sort things out before I can carry on with my job” I don’t know if that is what he’s thinking of if it is just a “f**k you” response because he is still shaken by it, still dealing with his trauma.

Jesus says we should forgive seventy times seven [Matthew 18:21-22] and forgive us our sins as we forgive others who have sinned against us [Matthew 6:12-14] – these verses are about asking God to forgive us not another human being. God, I think, is amazing and forgives us all things if we are genuinely sorry, but that’s because God doesn’t have all sorts of issues lurking about in God’s psych that inhibit that. All of us human beings come with traumas, hurts, played out scenes that our primordial brain goes to first and we react from there. We run through scenarios that often we don’t even realise we are doing but our primordial brain [elephant brain] does not forget and then tells our conscious brain how to react. From there we go into fight, flight, fawn, freeze, etc [meerkat brain] and from there react.

Some people will respond to an innocent request with anger because it has trigger something deep inside that they don’t even know about. So when we say sorry for something we don’t know what we are triggering within the person we are speaking to.

So I think we need to yes ask for forgiveness but then leave it there and not get upset if the person doesn’t respond to how we would like. Almost like leaving it in their porch and they can decide if they want to open it or not. And then we go to God to ask them to forgive us and to search our hearts. And maybe we also need to then forgive the person who did not accept our apology as we would have liked.

So we clear everything away from our hearts, give it all to God, realise it is about forgiveness rather than just saying sorry then who knows how much calmer and more peaceful we will feel?