I Was Wrong and I'm Sorry

Some liberating lines I am learning to add to regular conversations:

I have been a part of the problem.

I don’t have an answer to that.

I haven’t learned that yet.

I thought I was doing the right thing then, but now I wish I had known better.

I see now that my own unresolved sin, trauma, and story informed how I engaged this situation.

I have no words, but can I sit with you for a while?

I should have learned more about other perspectives before forming such a hard stance on this issue.

I’m here to just listen.

I was wrong.

Even though we disagree, I can see how important this is to you and I want to understand all the reasons why. Can you help me?

I value this entity, doctrine, local church, denomination, or leader dearly, but I can also see how you have been harmed by it/them and so I want to evaluate what I value and why.

It’s okay if our relationship needs to change.

I haven’t seen what you’ve seen but I believe your experience caused you pain.

I’m so sorry.

Here is some soup or tea, and here is a chair, and you are welcome here, just as you are today.

I wish all of these statements and questions were always a part of my vernacular, just as I wish many of them were a part of the conversations many have had with me over the years. These are things I needed to hear and things I needed to say, but many of them I just hadn’t learned yet. Another thing I’m learning is that that’s okay. “Things take the time they take,” Nate reminded me last night, quoting Mary Oliver. “How many roads did Saint Augustine take before he became Saint Augustine?” I finished for him.

Saint Augustine of Hippo, purchase here

We don’t know what we don’t know until we know it. And then once we know it, it takes a long time to get it in our guts deep enough that it becomes a part of who we are, and not just what we know. In the meantime, though, we’re a lot like the kid in that movie with the tattoo emblazoned across his clavicle, reading, “No Ragrets,” thinking we’re getting it right while all the while our indiscretions are obvious to anyone who really has already gotten it.

What is to be done, though, with the space between the not having learned it yet and the learning of it and then the second nature of it? There is so much space there and we are all in it together, at varying markers along the way, each of us interacting with all the others as if we’re at the same place, having learned the same thing, and having very little patience for those who aren’t or haven’t.

I thought, as I drifted to sleep last night, about all those roads Saint Augustine took before he became Saint Augustine. James K.A. Smith, writes in On the Road With Saint Augustine, “When you've realized that you don't even know yourself, that you're an enigma to yourself, and when you keep looking inward only to find an unplumbable depth of mystery and secrets and parts of yourself that are loathsome, then Scripture isn't received as a list of commands: instead, it breaks into your life as a light from outside that shows you the infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.”

The infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.

It seems to me that being able to say any of those above statements and meaning them truly and deeply, means we have taken all those other routes that seemed to make sense and have finally encountered that God at the bottom of the abyss. We have truly encountered a God whose love for us frees us to be wrong, to say “I don’t know,” to wish we had done something better or differently, to listen without defending ourselves. We know the only way through is not clawing at the clay on the sides of the abyss, desperately trying to get ourselves back on solid ground, but by standing on the back of Christ, love himself, and being lifted out through no power of our own.

Dallas Willard said, “We need teaching that will keep people remembering such things as: I'm not righteous because I do this. I'm not earning points. And when I fail, at whatever—solitude, fasting—I have not sinned.” I appreciate that because we are not sinning, at least not intentionally, if we don’t say those statements above or if we haven’t learned them yet. Those are statements that take discipline to say and to mean. We have to practice them, and we have to remember that the saying of them doesn’t make us righteous, they don’t give us points in the kingdom of God. The only thing they do is remind us of our own abyss, Christ’s back, and the love of God.

Saint Augustine took a lot of roads before he became Saint Augustine. He got it wrong again and again and again and again. But eventually that restlessness found its home in the love of God. Did he have regrets? I don’t know. But I hope not. I hope he can rest easy knowing that his myriad of roads have shown us it’s okay to not have learned something yet and that, once having learned it, the journey is still a hard one to take before it gets all the way into us.

But perhaps today one of us can start with this, “I am loved by God, held secure in him, known, cared for, and kept by him. I am freed from needing to feel like God or be like him, and so I am freed to confess I don’t know everything yet. But I want to learn. I want to learn.” Perhaps that is the road you or I will take today, on our way to become whatever God is making of each of us.