Nobody Should Have To Receive That

It nearly came out of him at a bus stop and he has been glad ever since that it did not.

He had got talking to a man about a delay, the way you do, and it had gone on for six or seven minutes and become genuinely enjoyable, and somewhere in it the man had mentioned his family and where they were from and what they kept.

And something rose in him with enormous force and he almost said: I am so sorry about what happened.

He did not. The bus came. They said the ordinary things and got on and sat in different parts of it.

And he sat there thinking about the sentence he had nearly handed a complete stranger at a bus stop, and about what it would have done to that man's afternoon.

Because think about it from the other side. A man is waiting for a bus. He has a life, plans, a delay, a conversation with a pleasant stranger. And the stranger turns and hands him several centuries of sorrow and an apology he did not ask for, and now he has to do something with it. Say it is all right, probably, which is not his to say. Or reassure the stranger, which is a job nobody should have to take on at a bus stop.

The apology would have felt wonderful to give and would have been work to receive.

He is forty eight and he has had that impulse maybe nine times in the last four years and he has never once let it out, and he is right about that, and it has cost him something.

Because it stays. That is what nobody tells you about swallowing something appropriate. It does not dissolve. It goes back down and waits for the next bus stop.

You know that impulse.

Maybe you have felt it and said it, and watched somebody be gracious about it while their face did something complicated. Maybe you have felt it and swallowed it nine times. Maybe you have avoided situations where it might arise, which is the third option and the loneliest.

Nobody is doing anything wrong in this story. Not you, not the man at the bus stop. The impulse is a decent one and the restraint is a decent one and there is still nowhere for it to go.

The one who can receive it

Here is the end of a psalm written by a man with something enormous to say and nobody on earth who could take it.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.Psalm 51:17

Read the direction of that sentence. O God. It is addressed upward, and everything difficult in that psalm is addressed upward, and the man does not go round the houses of Jerusalem discharging it onto people.

And read what is called a sacrifice. A broken spirit. Which is to say: the thing itself, brought, is the offering. Not a plan, not a restitution, not a speech. The state of the heart, handed over.

You are holding something that has a proper address, and it is not the man at the bus stop. That is what Psalm 51:17 does by naming a broken heart as the thing brought and God as the one it is brought to, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a real handing over rather than a private wallow, which is the difference between prayer and rumination.

And notice the last clause. Thou wilt not despise. He will not think less of you for it. That is written for people who suspect their own sorrow is excessive, self indulgent, or somehow not theirs to feel.

Your restraint was right

Before anything else, let this be said plainly, because you have half wondered whether swallowing it nine times was cowardice.

It was not. It was love.

Handing an unsolicited apology to a person who represents nobody but themselves makes them a representative of something they did not sign up to represent. They become, for the length of your sentence, a category instead of a man at a bus stop. And most people are extremely gracious about this and it costs them something anyway.

You have been protecting people, and the swallowing was a kindness rather than a failure of nerve. Scripture says let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves (Philippians 2:3), and it is the Holy Spirit who produces that instinct in a person, and He was standing at that bus stop with you when you did not say it.

And nothing here decides who owed anybody an apology in the first place. You are not being told what happened or whose it was, and this page assigns nothing to anybody. The word says judge nothing before the time (1 Corinthians 4:5), and His Spirit is the one who makes that a resting place rather than an evasion.