A pet peeve of mine is when a person hurts/offends you and all they say is "sorry". Sorry is just a word. When my kids apologize like that to me I answer with another word like "chair". Then they blink and remember that I like to hear an entire sentence:
"I am sorry, I was wrong, will you please forgive me?"
The first part of the sentence tells me they recognize the pain they have caused. The second part shows that they want to make some form of restituation. If someone just says "sorry", they aren't asking me to participate. I don't know if they mean it, either. But when they admit they were wrong and ask me to free them up, I know they get it.
Sometimes being sorry takes a period of time to fully comprehend. If something has been broken, there must be an offer to repair or replace it as part of the apology. Perhaps your child needs to do lawn work to clean up the yard they tee-peed with their buddies. Maybe they have to work to earn money for a new iPod for their brother when they broke his.
When my son was little and he broke something, he thought tape would fix anything. We had to teach him that tape did not hold everything back together. Sometimes something remained broken.
Teaching our kids to apologize is a tender subject because it forces us to look at our own lives. Have we been correct in our own histories? Are we apologetic enough? Do we even owe one of our kids an apology for our own actions? Ouch.
Once someome comes to me and asks for forgiveness, it is my responsibility to forgive them. If I refuse, that's my problem. They can go on their way knowing they have done what is necessary for the situation and the realationship. They are free.
Over time, I have developed my own definition of forgiveness to mean "letting go my right to have any input any longer and leaving their judgement up to God." If I don't forgive someone, I am dragging them as a weighty ball and chain affixed to my ankle into my future. Why would I want to be dragged down in my present and future because of something awful someone has done to me in my past??
When I hear popular radio shrink Dr. Laura tell people there are some things that are unforgivable, I completely disagree. I think there are some things so horrible they are hard to forget, but when we don't forgive we keep the awful thing alive and current. The harm needs to be addressed (sometimes by good counseling) and then we need to learn how to live because of and beyond what happened to us.
I knew a woman who could not forgive her adulterous husband, even when he fully apologized and worked for several years to rebuild her trust. Instead, she spoke about him to anyone who would listen and defined her life as the injured, on-going victim. After more years of this, the husband was driven away by her unforgiveness.
I come from a long line of unforgivers. Great-aunts and uncles and grandparents who dwelled on slights to the point of getting family written out of wills. That's why I call fanning the fire. Why do that when you could live a life of peace so far as possible?
There's a verse in the New Testament that gives me cause for pause whenever I am tempted to hang on to something. To the degree that I forgive others, Christ will forgive me. Yipes. I need tons of forgiveness!!! Therefore, I am going to do my best to work on forgiving others.
Notice that I said "work on forgiving". That's because some things are just too big to let go of right away. Just like the tide coming in, sometimes we find out how deeply someone has sinned against us. The sin took a period of time rolling in, so how can we snap our fingers and let it go in an instant? I don't think we can. But we can purpose to forgive in an instant. What's the difference?
Purposing to forgive means that you are in agreement with the need to do so, and with God's help you want to do that. Sometimes it takes time to process the level of offense. Sometimes that takes counseling. But each step of the way as you release the offender to God, you are lightened of the load you were carrying. It took me many months of hard work to release the pain my first husband caused. But now as I look back and speak about it, it is as if I am speaking of someone else's life - I am that free now, and have been for more years than the pain existed.
So it's urgent our children know how to forgive. For their souls. For the health of their lives on earth. And especially because we want our heavenly father to forgive them. And to do that, they need tender hearts that admit and ask for that very thing.
My prayer for every parent and child is that they will be open enough to learn how to forgive and to ask for forgiveness beyond the word "sorry."
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