I Have Been Apologizing To The Ground

You said sorry to a patch of dirt.

Out loud. More than once. And you have not told a living soul, and you would be mortified if anybody had heard, and you have spent a while now trying to decide what it means about you.

Let me lay out the two options you have been holding, because I think you have been running them both at once.

The first is that this is a man going slightly odd. A person alone in a yard talking to soil is not a good sign, and you know how it would sound if you described it at work.

The second, which arrives less often but hits harder, is that it might be the most honest thing you have said all year.

You are not going out of your mind, and an apology said to a piece of ground has never once been a wasted sentence.

And I want to say straight away that I think the second one is closer.

Because look at what is actually happening. Something real occurred. That ground was being tended and then it was not, and there is a genuine loss in that, and there has been nowhere at all to put it.

And a man will find somewhere. If there is no one to say a thing to, it will get said to whatever is present, and what was present was the ground.

A broken and a contrite heart

There is a line at the end of Psalm 51 about what God actually receives, and it is one of the shortest lists in Scripture.

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

Thou wilt not despise.

Now, that is a curious way to put it. He does not say thou wilt accept, or thou wilt be pleased with, though other verses do. He says thou wilt not despise, which answers a fear rather than making a claim.

And the fear it answers is exactly yours. That what you have got to offer is embarrassing.

You are being answered on the point you were actually worried about, and a broken thing has never once been despised in that verse. Psalm 51:17 addresses the fear of being found ridiculous rather than making a general promise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old line meet a man exactly where his embarrassment is.

And look at what is being called a sacrifice.

In that psalm, the writer has just said that God does not want a burnt offering, that if He did, one would be given. The whole apparatus of proper worship is set aside. And what is put in its place is a broken spirit.

Not a well-formed prayer. Not the right words in the right order in the right place. A broken spirit, which is what a man has when he is standing in a yard saying sorry to dirt.

You are holding the exact thing that verse calls a sacrifice, and a badly aimed apology has never once been outside what God said He receives. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is actually in a man rather than what he can present properly, and the written word puts a broken spirit in the place where the offerings used to go.

And there is a mercy in the fact that it is a psalm at all.

Psalm 51 is a man in the worst state of his life, writing it down. He did not wait until he was better. The record we have is from inside it.

You were never required to be further along before any of this counted, and a man in the middle of something has never once been at the wrong stage to be heard. The Spirit of God is the one who was present in the writing of it, and the word preserves a psalm composed from inside the trouble rather than after it.

What the apology was actually for

Let me be careful here, because there is a version of this that would be unkind, and it would be to say that there is nothing at all to apologize for.

That would be too quick and nobody would believe it.

Something did happen. You did stop. There were reasons, and the reasons were real, and it is still true that a piece of ground you were responsible for went to grass while you were not attending to it. Pretending otherwise would insult your own judgment.

You are able to have genuinely let something go and still not be under a sentence for it, and an honest account of what happened has never once had to become a condemnation. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man be accurate without being crushed, and Psalm 51:17 receives a broken spirit rather than requiring a defended one.

But here is the thing about the direction it has been going in.

The ground cannot forgive anybody. That is the whole difficulty and it is why saying it has not settled anything. A true and costly sentence went into a place with no capacity to answer, and so it had to be said again, and again, and it became a loop rather than a transaction.

That is not madness. It is a correct instinct with nowhere to land.

You have a real thing in your hands that has simply been going in the wrong direction, and a true sentence has never once failed because of what it was said to. The Spirit of God is the one who can receive what soil cannot, and the written word says thou wilt not despise, which is an answer rather than a silence.

Say it once more, and to God

So here is the assignment, and it is almost identical to what has already been happening out there.

Say it out loud once more, and this time say it to God rather than to the soil.

Same words. Do not improve them. Do not make it into a proper prayer with an opening and a closing, because the version you have been saying is more honest than anything you would compose.

You are able to keep the words you already have, and a sentence that came out of a man on its own has never once needed to be rewritten before it was said to God. Psalm 51:17 receives a broken spirit rather than a well-formed one, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in that yard while a man says the same thing one more time.

Stand in the same place. Look at the same ground, if that helps, because the ground is what pulled it out of you and there is no reason to be sentimental about where you stand.

Just change who it is addressed to.

And then stop. Do not say it again tomorrow. That is the point of doing it this way: an apology that has landed somewhere does not need repeating, and the loop you have been in is a loop precisely because nothing has been receiving it.

You are able to say a thing once and let it be finished, and an apology that has arrived somewhere has never once needed to be said again the following day. The Holy Spirit is the one who receives it and closes it, and the word says thou wilt not despise, which is the end of the matter rather than the start of a process.