Sorry for Sitting Down

Four times before eleven in the morning, and she counted, which is new, because a friend said something in a kind way about two weeks ago and she has been unable to stop hearing it since.

Sorry, when somebody had to move slightly so she could get past in the hallway at work.

Sorry, on the phone, for taking up the man's time, when the man's entire job is answering that phone.

Sorry, in the kitchen at half past ten, when a colleague came in and found her there, as though the kitchen had been booked and she had failed to check.

And then the fourth one, which is the one that made her sit down on the edge of the bath at lunchtime and put her hands over her face. She had gone home for something. She was in her own house. She sat down on her own couch, at the exact moment her husband came into the room, and she said sorry.

To nobody. For nothing. In her own house. On her own couch.

She is thirty eight. She has a lot of theories about where this came from and most of them are probably partly right and none of them have made any difference at all, which she is fairly clear about, because she has had the theories for about a decade.

Here is the description she would give, if you got her at the right moment and she trusted you. It is not that she thinks she is worthless; she would find that phrase melodramatic and would not use it. It is that her presence, in any room, feels to her like a small imposition that requires acknowledgment. As though being somewhere is a cost, and the sorry is the fee.

You will have your own edge of the bath. The moment you hear yourself apologize for something that could not possibly need an apology.

The verse everybody quotes and almost nobody stands on

There is a line in the long psalm about being known that gets put on cards and mugs and is worn almost smooth, and I want to hand it back sharp.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.Psalm 139:14

Look at the middle phrase, because the second half of it is where the weight sits. Wonderful are your works. The subject of the sentence has quietly changed. He is not praising himself; he is praising the maker, and the thing he is calling wonderful is God's workmanship, of which he is an instance.

Which is why this is not a self esteem verse and does not work as one. It is a statement about the quality of somebody else's craft, and the person speaking is the object rather than the author.

That matters enormously to a woman apologizing on her own couch, because it means the question of whether her presence is justified is not hers to answer. She is not the one who decided she should be in the room. Somebody made something and put it here.

So take it plainly: you are somebody else's work standing in a room, and that is what Psalm 139 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from an old psalm and lays it down on the edge of a bath at lunchtime.

And notice fearfully, which is an odd word in English and means something like: made with awe, made in a way that produces awe. It is not a modest word. The psalm is not offering her a floor of basic acceptability. It is describing craftsmanship somebody took seriously.

Now, the fee. Her sense is that presence costs and the sorry is the payment. And the psalm describes a person who did not commission herself, was not consulted about being made, and did not pay for the making. Which means there is nobody to reimburse. The fee she has been paying four times a morning is not going to a creditor; it is going nowhere at all, out of a woman who has less to give than she thinks.

You have been paying a fee to nobody, and there was never an invoice, because the written word puts the making entirely on God's side, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a person who has had good theories for ten years and no relief from any of them.

What the sorries are not

Now the guardrail, and I want to be careful because this is exactly where advice does damage.

Nobody here is telling her to stop saying it. A woman who now has to monitor her own speech for a word has been handed one more thing to fail at, and she has enough. If she says sorry six times tomorrow that is not a relapse, because there is nothing here to relapse from.

And the ten years of theories are not wasted and the habit is not a sin to be confessed. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, every single time, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

You are held by a regard that has never once been billed, and you were held by it on the couch at lunchtime, because Scripture puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

And if a thing this old has a root that needs proper attention, that is worth saying plainly rather than spiritualizing. A good counselor is not a lack of faith and never was. Ask the doctor who a person actually sees for this, in those words, rather than waiting for somebody to offer. And if the sense of being an imposition has begun to slide toward the thought that the room would be better without you in it at all, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

You have nothing to be ashamed of in asking somebody qualified, because the written word never treats getting help as a failure of trust, and His Spirit is what makes that permission real rather than theoretical.