Recently, I received an apology. I knew it was coming.
I knew it was coming, because it was revealed to me during my prayer time.
Some of you are thinking, “What?! What the heck is she talking about? It was revealed to her?” But some of you know exactly what I am talking about. Sometimes things come up in prayer and you don’t exactly know why. But if you sit with it for a while, turn it around, look at it, ask Jesus why these thoughts are in your head and be quiet for just a stinkin’ minute, you begin to see why.
I didn’t know who was going to apologize to me. But I knew someone would. And I knew that Jesus was showing me this, so that I would be gracious.
But let me tell you — I did not want to be gracious.
These last two years have been grueling. I have been abandoned by friends. Gossiped about. Excluded from communities. In trouble for things I never did. Or good things people thought were wrong. And I was retaliated against for speaking the truth.
Many of the people who did these things to me, I thought I was close to.
My friends. My community. My family in Christ.
And I didn’t want to be gracious. I didn’t want to forgive.
When Jesus revealed to me that someone would apologize, I actually began to pray, “But you don’t know how hurt I am!”
Who did I think I was? Jesus had experienced all of this. He experienced this betrayal at a far deeper level than I ever had or would … and there were times when I was the one who abandoned him.
In the Our Father we pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are to forgive because he forgave us first. Our faith is based on forgiveness.
When I pray those lines in the Our Father, the faces of those who have hurt me come to my mind. I can see them so clearly and I feel like someone punched me in the gut. I know I must forgive them.
Jesus was preparing my heart so I could be gracious to this person when they asked for forgiveness. As Christians we are predisposed to grace and forgiveness. We should never forget that.
It was a week later when I found her waiting by my car. A woman whose face sometimes appears in my mind when I pray the Our Father. I was surprised to see her and bristled a bit but said hello in a welcoming way that could only have come from God. She said she was waiting for me because she wanted to apologize. And I knew that this was the moment Jesus was preparing me for.
It takes a lot to seek out someone to say you are sorry. That you realize the things that you’ve done were hurtful and damaging to another. I imagine many of us, myself included, have apologies like this to make for some of the hurtful ways we have acted — these last few years especially.
In Ephesians it says, “Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ” (4:32). And when Peter asked Jesus how many times we should forgive a person who sins against us, Jesus answered, “not seven times but seventy-seven times” (Matthew 18:22).
“Will you forgive me?” she asked.
Yes, I do.
Northwest Catholic — August/September 2022