The Truth about Sorry

I learnt this lesson though a rather painful family fall-out. I won t go into all the details, except to say that I regret having taken so long to learn it. The sad truth about restoring any relationship is that both parties have to participate! We cannot change how another person feels except to pray for God to change their hearts, and for an opportunity to make amends. When my own tragedy occurred, I never believed it would take years to get resolved, but I see now that sometimes God does separate us from people in order to do a work in each of us. The lesson God showed me is that there are always two sides to every breakdown there is the other party s truth of how they perceive what happened, there is your own truth of how you perceive what happened and then there is God s truth, somewhere in-between! In every relationship breakdown, there is not just what was said or done, but how we made the other person feel that often gets in the way and is often the point at where we stumble, because we fail to realise this or put ourselves in the other person's shoes. We often feel justified in what we said or did and therefore we see no need or reason to apologise. Sometimes we can even become self-righteous and believe that it was needed in order to correct the other person. But I believe that anything that is said or done that destroys a relationship is never what God would want - unless of course if the relationship was a poison to you in the first place! By that I mean there are some relationships that are toxic to our growth as a Christian and we would be wise to cut those ones ones off. Unfortunately that is very hard to do when it is with a family member. Often in any relationship there may be times when conflict is needed in order to be honest, but this should be done in love and the end result should always be towards reconciliation. But as humans we can often say or do things in anger in response to an offense and although we cannot erase our words or undo our actions, but we can apologise sincerely from the heart, repent remorsefully and ask them to give us another chance to make amends. What we shouldn t do is to promise never to do it again.