The Apology You Cannot Make Because They Are Gone

Almost everything I was taught about putting things right assumes the other person is available.

Go to them. Say it plainly. Make restitution where restitution is possible. That is good teaching and I have given it many times and I stand behind all of it.

And it is useless to a man I sat with on a headland who had done something to his father and had not said anything about it for two years, and then his father died in a hospital nine hundred miles away on a Wednesday afternoon.

There is nothing in the standard teaching for him. The door is not narrow. The door is gone.

I want to talk about that plainly, because it is more common than anybody admits, and the people carrying it are usually carrying it silently, because every version of the advice they have ever heard begins with a step they cannot take.

The distance in that psalm

The verse people quote about forgiveness has a measurement in it, and the measurement was chosen carefully.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12, King James Version)

East from west. Somebody chose that axis and did not choose the other one. North and south have poles. A person traveling north eventually stops going north and starts going south, and the distance is finite and measurable.

East and west never meet. A person going east goes east forever. There is no point at which the two lines converge.

That is not a poetic flourish. It is a deliberate choice of measurement by somebody who could have said north and south and did not.

You have a distance chosen on purpose, and the choosing is in the text rather than in anybody's reading of it (Psalm 103:12). That work is the Spirit's, and He makes a measurement land on a person who has been pacing the same closed room for years.

That is the distance named, and it is named about something that has already been done rather than something being offered.

You are dealing with a removal that has already happened and that has no meeting point in it (Psalm 103:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a measurement like that to somebody who cannot deliver an apology.

And the verse three lines later says something about why He does it that belongs in this article specifically.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. (Psalm 103:14)

He knoweth our frame. That is not an excuse being offered. It is the reason given for His pity, and it is about the material a person is made of rather than about their record.

What cannot be done and what can

Let me be careful and honest, because the wrong version of this teaching is cruel in both directions.

Nothing here says the harm did not happen or that it did not matter. It happened, and it mattered, and if it can still be repaired anywhere in this life then repair is the right thing and no verse in this article excuses anybody from it.

And nothing here offers a way of speaking to the dead. Scripture does not permit it, this site will not sell it, and a person who tries it will not find comfort there.

What can be done is smaller and stranger, and it is what David did.

When his child died, after a week of fasting and lying on the ground, he got up and washed and ate, and the people around him did not understand it. And he said this.

But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. (2 Samuel 12:23)

I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. He does not pretend the door is open. He names the direction the traffic goes in and he stops trying to send something back down a road that only runs one way.

You have permission to stop attempting something that cannot be done, and stopping is not indifference, it is accuracy (2 Samuel 12:23). The same Spirit is the one who lets a person put down an attempt they have been making for years in the dark.

And this belongs here plainly, because a grief with guilt in it is one of the heaviest things a person carries. If it has taken you somewhere darker, where being here at all has come into question, that is not for an article to hold. Tell somebody tonight: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.

Where the debt actually sits

Here is the part that took me longest to understand and that I now think is the whole matter.

A person in this position is holding a debt open on their own. There is nobody to pay it to and no way to close it, so they keep it open, and keeping it open feels like the only honest thing available. Closing it would feel like walking away.

But a debt held open by the debtor alone, with no creditor in the room, is not a debt. It is a self-imposed sentence, and it goes on indefinitely because there is nothing that can end it.

Scripture puts the offense somewhere else entirely, and David says it in the same breath as naming a very concrete human wrong.

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned. That line has troubled people for centuries because there was obviously a human being harmed. What it means is not that the human harm was nothing. It means the account that can be settled is with God, because He is the one who can actually close it.

You have a creditor who is present and able to close this, which is not true of the account you have been trying to settle (Micah 7:19), and it is the Spirit who moves a matter from a room with nobody in it to a room where somebody can act.