Already Saved (Excerpt)
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Years ago, I worked in Arizona’s so-called justice system. A woman named Kathy McCormick, who worked at the Attorney General’s Office doing victim-offender mediation, told me this story. A woman’s house had been horribly vandalized, with damage in the thousands and thousands of dollars. She met with one of the young men who was responsible. She knew he could not undo the damage. He could not pay for it either. The books could not be balanced. She wanted something else. She wanted to be able to think of him as a good person. So she asked him to take pictures of himself being good. When he read to his little brother, when he helped a neighbor, he was to take a picture. Months later they got together again and he shared his picture album with her. She had introduced him to a side of himself he didn’t know existed and she was able to think of his goodness as well. Some time after that mediation, the boy’s mother called to say he was headed for college. She believed that mediation was the turning point in his life.
When we live out of our best selves, our saved selves, our place of worthiness, we can say we are sorry. We can practice confession because we know that being wrong does not mean we are not worthy. It means we are human. We can apologize. We can work to make amends. We can take steps so it doesn’t happen again. Being human means we will be wrong. It means we will be wrong in the way we are right. It means that we are complicit with structures of oppression and evil. It means our relationships will go kaflooey. (That’s a theological term.) Knowing our essential worth, we need only to get back to that place when we lose our way.
And to practice confession, the first important step is to own our part. I used to think that confession or saying I was sorry was just for when I thought I was wrong. But it’s not. Because I am often wrong in the way I am right. Do you know what I mean? And sometimes my relationships go kaflooey and I have no idea why. But I can say that I’m sorry that things are the way they are, and that I want to do whatever it takes to have them be some other way. I have a long-time friendship that just seems to have hit the skids. I have been trying to figure out what it’s about instead of simply going to her and saying, “I miss you and I’m wondering if I have done something that is keeping our friendship from flourishing right now. I am sorry about the way things are between us.” In recognizing both the worth of what is there and confessing the brokenness, I can find my way toward restoration.
- Always Faithful - October 1, 2019
- Already Saved (Excerpt) - April 1, 2019
What a great story, and it coincides with something I’ve been thinking about. There is a platform called Catcat, where IanMcKellen has a “path.” (Catcat seems to have to dream up different names for everything). I would say it’s a column or landing page and he is the author or editor, but they say its a path and he’s the curator. Anyway, his topic is “Stand up to Bullying.” He has the slogan, “No bystanders.” One of the videos linked to his path gives examples of people actually defusing serious armed confrontations. In one, a woman calmly, slowly walked up to a man in the van of an armed group apparently set on violence. She placed her hand on the man’s rifle and slowly lowered it. This was very impressive, but it left me wondering what I could do to not be a bystander if I witnessed a lesser form of bullying by one individual toward another, for example, ugly name calling. I was thinking, what if I walked up to the bully and looked him in his eyes, realized that he is hurting, whether he knows it or not. And I could say something like, “There is beauty in you, and goodness. You deserve love and respect.” Your story has encouraged me to think maybe I am on the right track with my plan for not being a bystander to bullying. What do you think?