I Have Apologized For This So Many Times

Same thing. Same hour, roughly. Same words out of your mouth afterwards.

And this time, when you said sorry, you heard it land the way a coin lands in an empty tin. Thin. Familiar. A sound everybody in the room has heard before.

Because it is not the first time. It is not the fourth time. If you are honest you could not put a number on it, and that inability to count is itself part of what is sitting on you tonight.

The words have not changed. What has changed is that they have been spent so often they have stopped buying anything, and you can see that in the face of the person you are saying them to. Not anger. Something more like patience, which is worse.

I am not going to give you a way to break the pattern. That is a technique and this is not a place that hands those out. And I am not going to tell you the repetition does not matter, because it clearly matters to you, and dismissing that would be a kind of contempt.

They fail not

There is a line in Lamentations that most people know half of, and the half that gets left out is the half you need tonight.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. (Lamentations 3:22, King James Version)

Fail not. That is a supply statement, and it is written in the present tense about something continuous.

Not, His compassions were sufficient. Not, His compassions will be renewed if the pattern is broken. Fail not, which is a claim about a thing that does not run down under repeated use.

You have compassions that do not fail, and they have never once been rationed according to how many times a person has come back. Lamentations 3:22 says his compassions fail not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a kitchen where somebody has just heard their own apology land badly.

And look at the first half. It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed.

Consumed means used up, burned through, finished. The verse is written by somebody watching a city smoke, and the point of it is that the reason he still exists is not his own resilience.

You are not consumed, and the reason for that has never once been that you managed to stop needing mercy. It is written in Lamentations 3:22 that the mercies are why anybody is still standing, and the Spirit of God is the one who says that over a person who is quietly certain they have used up their allowance.

The apology has not worn out, you have

Here is the thing I want to get exactly right, because the distinction is the whole article.

You said the apology has stopped working. What has actually happened is that saying it has stopped working on you.

Their end is not the same as yours. A child hearing an apology for the fifth time is not sitting there running a ledger. That is an adult activity and mostly a private one, and it is happening on your side of the table and nowhere else.

Lamentations 3:22 makes the supply about God rather than about the frequency of the asking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a ledger away from somebody who has been keeping it in secret.

You are not overdrawn, and there has never been an account anywhere with a limit on it in your name. Lamentations 3:22 puts the compassions beyond failing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who refuses to meter what God has not metered.

And here is the plain thing, because the repetition has become an accusation and it is not one.

Doing the same thing again is not a verdict on you. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not proof that the sorry was never sincere in the first place.

A person can mean something completely and do it again. Those two facts sit beside each other in almost every life ever lived, and the second one does not cancel the first.

You have meant every one of those apologies, and doing it again has never once made a single one of them false. The written word calls the compassions unfailing in Lamentations 3:22 rather than conditional, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to reread a person's history as a case for insincerity.

Take the promise off the end

There is one thing about the apology itself, and it is not a technique, it is a subtraction.

Take off the promise.

Most repeated apologies have one welded to the back. I am sorry, and it will not happen again. And when it does happen again, that promise is the part that failed, and it drags the apology down with it.

An apology and a guarantee are two different objects. The first one is about what happened. The second one is about the future, which nobody owns, and putting it in there is what makes the fifth apology sound thinner than the first.

You are not required to guarantee anything, and the sorry has never once needed a promise welded to it to be real. It is written in Lamentations 3:22 that the compassions come without terms attached, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a condition off a sentence that was fine without it.

Lamentations 3:22 does not put a condition on the compassions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person that God's own mercy comes without a guarantee attached about anybody's behavior.

You are able to apologize without promising anything, and the strength of it has never once come from a guarantee. Lamentations 3:22 has mercies arriving without terms, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a sorry with nothing welded on the back of it.