The Apology I Put in Front of It

Cerys counted them once, out loud, in the car, and then wished she had not.

Seven words. There are seven words she now says before she says the word. She timed it going round the coast road and she said the whole preamble out loud to the windscreen to hear how it sounded, and it sounded like somebody bringing a dish to a table and apologizing for it while it is still in their hands.

I know how this sounds, but.

That is one version. There are others. I'm not one of those. Don't worry, I'm not going to. This will sound mad, but.

She did not invent them on purpose. Nobody sits down and drafts an apology to go in front of a true thing. They accumulate, the way a path gets worn, one small avoidance at a time over about five years, until the shape of the sentence has changed and you did not attend a single meeting where it was decided.

What made her count them was her mother.

Her mother is eighty-one and says the word with no runway at all. She says it in the post office. She said it to a man fitting a boiler last winter, entirely naturally, in a sentence about her week, and the man said right, aye and carried on with the boiler and it was completely fine, and Cerys stood in the doorway of her own mother's kitchen with a tea towel and felt something she could not name for about an hour.

It was not embarrassment. That was what she checked for first.

It was closer to homesickness.

Her mother has never been braver than Cerys. Her mother is not a bold woman. She is a small, careful person who worries about parking. It is simply that in her mouth the word has no apology in front of it, because in her generation and in her town nobody ever taught her to put one there, and so the sentence comes out at its own length.

And Cerys, who is not a coward either, has been shortening herself for five years and only just heard it.

Here is the part that stayed with her on the coast road. The seven words do not protect her. They have never once protected her. Nobody has ever been kinder to her because of them. All they do is arrive first and quietly agree, in advance, that the thing coming is a bit much.

She apologizes for it, and then she says it, and then it lands on a table that she herself set for it badly.

And you know those words, because you have your own set, and you could probably say them right now without thinking, which is exactly the problem.

Nothing was ever wrong with the news, so nothing needs to go in front of it

Take this off before we go any further, because you have been carrying it a long way and it was never yours.

You are not responsible for making a true thing acceptable before it arrives. You never were. Scripture puts a finished announcement in your hands and never once asks you to negotiate its reception in advance, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your run up, who opens a person to it. Set that down. It is heavy and you have been carrying it round the coast road for five years.

Now hear the sentence underneath all of this, and hear where the man writing it was sitting when he wrote it.

He was writing to the capital city. The most powerful, most sophisticated, most opinionated room in the known world, a place where a message about a crucified provincial would have sounded, frankly, mad. And he opens the letter with a line that has no runway on it at all.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.Romans 1:16

Notice what he does not do. He does not say I know how this sounds. He does not say I'm not one of those. He states the absence of shame and moves straight on to what the thing actually is.

And notice the reason he gives, because the reason is not about him. He is not unashamed because he is bold. He is unashamed because of what the message is: power that belongs to God, doing the work.

That is why an apology in front of it makes no sense. You cannot usefully apologize for something whose whole strength is not yours.

You are carrying that. Right now, in your car, on your coast road, in a week with nothing special in it. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes it live in a person, and He has never once needed a warm up from you to do it.

Now here is the tender part, and I want to say it gently, because you have been hard on yourself since you counted them.

Those seven words are not sin and they are not cowardice. They are a bruise. Something happened, or a series of small things happened, and you learned that the word costs a little, and you began paying up front to make the cost smaller. That is what a person does with a bruise. They put a hand over it before anybody comes near.

But a bruise is not a verdict on you and it is not a verdict on the word.

You have this whole, not in fragments. Scripture calls it the power of God for salvation and His Spirit is the one carrying that power, and none of that arrived damaged, and none of it needs your protection to survive a conversation in a post office.

And I will say the plain thing, because it is the thing that will actually help. The apology does not make the word smaller in the room. It makes it smaller in you. That is where the shrinking happens. The other person forgets your seven words in about a second, and you carry them all the way home.