Why it took me 16 years to make amends

I did a Step 9 recently, a making of amends I’d been planning a decade and a half.

I couldn’t do it until the right time.  Until I could be sure I would not injure the person I was saying my apology to and seeking forgiveness from.

I could not go to them in the fullness of confidence without knowing I would not hurt them.

Many people may read the title and wonder why I waited so long.  Well, I was making amends all along, but I couldn’t have the actual conversation I was planning until I knew it was the right time for them.

All the while I waited, I thought about them, about what I’d done, and about how I could make it better for them.  How I could be kind when I hadn’t previously been unequivocally kind.  How I could be gracious when I’d occasionally been harsh.

As I waited and as I spent time with this person, trying my best to love them in a way I hadn’t loved them before, I noticed their grace reciprocated.  They too were kind.  As I reached out, they reached back.  I didn’t reach out so that they would reach back, it was just that they reciprocated care for care.

Making amends is a sacred work.  It is a contrition that goes beyond shame to do restitution because making things right is the right thing to do.

In all reality, as broken, fallen human beings, we all ought to be in service to our fellow humans to the degree of making amends—generally and specifically.

We make our amends generally to all we wrong in a general way.  We also make a special commitment to amends to all those we develop close relationships with who we betray in some deeper way.

We look to our entrenched conflicts and we wonder and pray into why they’re so perplexing for us and the other.  We develop acuity for our own contribution to the malaise, and we disregard for a moment what they did.  We design our amends and then ask ourselves, “Is it safe for them right now to receive it?  Will it hurt them when I tell them?”

If only we were to imagine those who have perhaps abused us making their amends.  We do that and we realise the powers of God in redemption.  It restores our belief in the power of God to transform a person to repentance.  It gives us confidence that God is indeed at work in our world.  And, of course, we desire to see the flow of this Spirit in ourselves too.

Making formal amends after 16 years, having practiced amends all that time, was an answer to my prayers because it was an answer to their prayers.  Justice was served.  Two people touched by the Spirit of God.

The key principle in making amends is doing it to cause no more harm.  It’s such a commitment to amends that it blesses the person we’d harmed at every turn; that it wouldn’t be good enough to make them suffer more.

See what such amends does when we practice it in our mind?  It makes us gentle with them in our heart, it makes our heart hold them there, in a space where we can only wish them well, where we genuinely acknowledge they always deserved better.

Such a practice of amends is possibly the best investment in our spirituality.