The Magic of Sorry

The word sorry, spoken sincerely by someone who has wronged you, has an almost magical quality to it. The bitterness and anger and animosity we feel towards the person has a tendency to begin thawing immediately at a hastened rate.

All because of this single word.

Whenever we are wronged, we are mistreated in ways that do not align with our true identity as a human created in the image of God. People treat us like a stranger when they are disloyal to us, like an enemy when they betray us, and like an object when they abuse us. Our identity is attacked and sometimes even smashed to pieces.

We become desperate to hear the word sorry from the people who did this, because we long to have our identity restored and the injustice we suffered righted in some small way through an acknowledgement of the respect and honour we deserve.

The issue is that we rarely hear a sorry. The magic never arrives.

The harsh reality is that all of us are slow to apologise. We all get hooked into playing a blame game or upholding our own perceived sense of innocence or simply remain oblivious to how we’ve hurt others. And so, even those of us who know how powerful a sorry can be, and who long to hear it for ourselves, often remain resistant to saying sorry to those we wrong.

Waiting for a sorry that may never come is therefore a recipe for preventing our own healing. Yes we deserve it, yes it is right we hear one, but no, we cannot make our healing dependent upon it.

We need to bring a fresh understanding to how the magic of sorry works: sorry heals damaged relationships, it does not heal wounded individuals.

Our problem is, we look for a sorry too early in the process. Healing is actually found through a process of lamenting and forgiving, and the restoration of our identity is something we need to rely upon God to restore. This all can happen completely independent of the wrongdoer.

When we are ready, and if it is safe to do so, we can then reach out and offer reconciliation to the person who mistreated us, without accusation and false expectation.

The magic of sorry is not that it heals us after being mistreated, it’s that its magic can restore people into loving relationship despite the wrongs they’ve committed against each other in the past.