One of my favorite things is to hang out with my friends who have families. Some of those friends have teenagers now that I remember as newborns just coming home from the hospital. Being a traveling musician allows me to make the rounds and stop in to catch up with folks I’ve come to love over the course of many different seasons of my life, and I’m thinking of how good it has been to see, in my friend’s homes, so many wonderful examples of what families can look like. I’ve seen and heard much of the pain and difficulty, and I’ve seen some very beautiful things.  

One of the most startling and beautiful things I have seen over the years has been families that model humility and, more specifically, apologizing.  

Apologizing is a funny thing, isn’t it? There is something about it that feels incredibly dangerous. Why is that? Why do we feel so much resistance to it? I know it doesn’t come naturally or comfortably for me. It’s really been the experience of seeing other people do it well that has made me want to learn to do it, too. 

I remember one of the first times I saw an adult parent apologize to their child. It was a bit of a shock to me, honestly. Maybe it did happen in my family, but I have no memory of it ever happening. Admitting you were wrong and apologizing is not something I remember being modeled for me growing up. Not at school or at home. So you can imagine how startled I was to hear my friends admit a mistake, say they were sorry, and ask for forgiveness from their child. And then to see the child respond with grace; to see parent and child build trust, vulnerability, and peace together through humility. It was beautiful. But it also made me a little uncomfortable, and that made me curious as to why I felt those two apparently contradictory emotions. Why did apologizing feel dangerous and beautiful at the same time? 

I’d like to start with the most basic human need, which is to be loved. Belovedness is what we were created for. To be wholly known, seen, welcomed, and delighted in by another (any other, but ultimately God) is fundamental to what it means to be alive. We die a little bit when some part of us remains unknown and unseen, quarantined from access to love. We die a little bit when someone rejects us and we feel unwelcome and unwanted in the world. We die a little bit when we experience ourselves as a disappointment and a cause of displeasure in someone else’s eyes. 

We so deeply require the seeing, knowing, welcoming, delight of another soul. The threat of being unseen, unknown, unwelcome, and displeasing to others is genuinely terrifying. It’s terrifying because it gnaws at us in the very deepest places, right down at the roots of our being. A threat to that place is a threat to the legitimacy of our very existence. It can be hard to find a reason to live, if you feel fundamentally unloved or unloveable. 

This might be where some of the sense of danger comes from as we approach apologizing. To apologize is to expose a deep place of vulnerability where we are admitting there’s something frighteningly reject-able about me. I’m giving someone else a kind of unguarded access to the root of my being, and that can go in two directions. One: they can say that my offense has, for them, absorbed their entire sense of who I am, and that they can’t see me without seeing the wrong. They can throw us out of their life, baby and bathwater. Or Two: they can say that they see a friend who has done something wrong and hurtful, but that they know you are so much more than the sum of your failures. They can hose down the baby in the yard, wrap it in a towel, and bring it inside the warm house. 

If we’ve experienced that kind of forgiveness and welcome from a love that is not blind, then the core of our being is safe in the knowledge of our belovedness. We can be wrong, and it won’t kill us. We can apologize and know that the baby will never be thrown out, though it’s certain to need regular changing and washing. That frail, tender creature at our core will grow a little more secure as it grows up in a climate of love. 

However, I’ll speak for myself, that I have a tendency to defend myself when first begin to hear the call to apologize. Rather than admitting I was wrong, surely the better thing to do would be to explain the situation so that you understand the (most) good intentions I had. You see, there were extenuating circumstances, I see there was a right thing to do, but you can understand why I couldn’t do it, and on and on. In short, I opt to protect myself from the possibility of rejection. If I can soften the offense, then I can lessen the vulnerability. Here’s the thing, if that becomes a habit, it creates all kinds of blindspots; and in the long run, a really pervasive practice of self-protection makes way for the justification of any number of despotic cruelties. It’s dictators who become paranoid that someone is out to get them, tyrants who silence anyone who might speak against them, abusers who prey on the vulnerabilities of others so that their own vulnerabilities are not exposed. Cain’s murder of his brother Abel was the wrong response to an invitation to admit he was wrong. 

Similarly, Jesus’s blood is spilled by a race who have followed Cain’s habit of protecting ourselves against the vulnerability of admitting that we are wrong. Cain shows us that Murderous Pride and Debilitating Insecurity are are two sides of the same coin. We’re afraid Jesus will reject us if we apologize, so we reject him. But nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus’s every intention as he approaches us is to see, know, welcome, and delight in us, if we will see, know, welcome, and delight in him. 

Ironically, though God has no sin to apologize for, he chooses the way of vulnerability. Jesus chooses the same kind of unguarded exposure to our potential disgust that feels so dangerous to us. We are allowed to throw him out with the bathwater. To spit on him, hate him, beat him, reject him. And yet there he is again and again bending down to wash our feet – an embrace that brings life and blessing at the very roots of our being where we most need to know that we are known, seen, welcomed, and delighted in. Because he knew he was loved by the Father, he didn’t have to defend himself. He could afford to wash the babies, wrap them in his towel, and bring them in to live in the house. 

When I cease trying to protect myself from God, and allow him to touch those most tender places with his gentle and complete acceptance, I can forgive myself, and I can forgive others. When I am safe in Jesus’s vulnerability, I can afford to be vulnerable myself. There is another good conversation to be had about safe and unsafe people, but here I’m talking mainly about my own desire to get better at apologizing. Because growing in our ability to apologize is key to loosening the grip of fear on our hearts, allowing our thirsty roots to stay near the Living Water – like naked toes in Jesus’s washbasin, where God in vulnerability and humans in vulnerability meet in a place that feels so dangerous. But that is the place and those are the conditions where we discover we truly are known, seen, welcomed, and delighted in.