Please read this before the sermon on Sunday, 8-29-2021.

Apologizing shouldn't be hard. Recognizing and then owning your mistakes leads to a healthy relationship with the truth. It also makes you a better person in the eyes of those close to you and those you come across in the course of your days. Honesty and integrity matter; building trust with others requires admitting when you've erred.

Requesting forgiveness is a balancing act. For example, never start an apology with "I'm sorry if…" Trying to qualify guilt is an avoidance technique. Throwing it back at the aggrieved is counterproductive. You're effectively saying, "I'm sorry that you misunderstood my intentions." That's not an apology. It's arrogance.

A large part of the problem, writes Carol Tavris and Elliot Anderson in Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), is that Westerners treat mistakes like personal failings, not as inherent to the learning process. An example in the book involves a pair of American researchers that sat in a Japanese classroom watching a student struggle to achieve the right answer. He was at the board for 40 minutes; the discomfort was palpable. Only later did the researchers realize they were discomfited, not the student; he stayed with the challenge, making mistake after mistake until the right answer arrived. At that moment the entire class erupted in applause. His peers were not snickering but cheering him on.

What a difference from a culture that treats any mistake as an existential failing, a mindset that creates guilt whenever one strays from the path. Instead of owning the mistake and asking for forgiveness we often double down. As Tavris and Anderson write:

"An unbending need to right inevitably produce self-righteousness. When confidence and convictions are unleavened by humility, by an acceptance of fallibility, people can easily cross the line from healthy self-assurance to arrogance."

The flip side to avoiding mistakes is getting so bogged down by them progress becomes impossible...

contributed by Jordan Peterson.