She said sorry to a chair this morning.
She walked into it, in her own apartment, with nobody else there, and she said sorry out loud, and then she stood in her kitchen and thought about that for slightly longer than a person should have to.
She counts sometimes. Not obsessively, but she has counted. Forty is not an exaggeration. Sorry when somebody else bumps her. Sorry before a question. Sorry for taking up four seconds of a barista's day. Sorry for crying, sorry for laughing too loudly, sorry twice in one message and then a third time for the length of the message.
Her friends find it endearing, mostly, and one of them has started gently pointing it out, which has had the effect of adding an apology for apologizing.
Here is what nobody knows. There was a thing when she was twenty. She took it to God, properly, in a way that was real and not performative, and she settled it, and she is not confused about the doctrine. If you asked her she could explain forgiveness clearly and warmly, and she has explained it to other people, and she meant it.
And the sorries did not stop. If anything they got worse after she settled it, which is the detail that has quietly destroyed her confidence, because how do you explain that.
So somewhere in six years she stopped reading the reflex as a habit and started reading it as a report. Something in her is still apologizing, all day, every day, to everybody, which must mean that at the level underneath the doctrine, something has not actually been dealt with.
Maybe you have a reflex. It might not be sorry. It might be shrinking in a room, or over-explaining, or checking. Something in your body has kept doing a thing years after the thing was settled, and you have quietly upgraded it from a habit to a verdict.
Sit down on the counter stool. Nothing in the next ten minutes is going to tell you the reflex is nothing.
A reflex is not a report
Here is the distinction, and everything else here rests on it.
There is what is legally true about a person and there is what her mouth does before she has decided anything. Those are two different registers and they can disagree for years without either one moving the other. A verdict is entered in a court. A reflex fires in a nervous system about four hundred milliseconds before a thought arrives. A nervous system has never sat on a bench in any court that matters.
How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.Hebrews 9:14
Read what that verse aims at. Not the record. The conscience. Scripture assumes there is such a thing as a cleared person with a conscience still running old software, and it does not tell her to fix the software before she comes. It says the blood is what purifies it, and the purifying is His work and not her project.
You are being cleaned at the level of the conscience by Somebody else's work, and Hebrews 9 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the purifying and not four hundred milliseconds of habit.
And notice what the verse does not promise. It does not say the reflex stops by Tuesday. You have been holding God to a timetable that is not written anywhere, and what He wrote is about the purifying and not about your mouth in a coffee shop, and His Spirit is the one who has kept you reading the actual sentence.
Why it got worse after you settled it
Now the detail that has done the most quiet damage, because it deserves an answer rather than a hand on the arm.
The sorries got worse after it went to God. And that has been read ever since as the most damning fact available, on the reasoning that if the thing were dealt with, the pressure would have come off rather than gone up.
Here is what actually happens. Before a person settles something, most of the energy goes into not thinking about it. Once it is settled, the attention comes back online, and everything that was built on top of it during the years of not thinking about it becomes visible for the first time. The reflex was there the whole time. What changed is that you can now see it.
That is not deterioration. That is the lights coming on in a room that was always that untidy. You were not getting worse, and 1 Corinthians 13 says now we see in a mirror dimly but then face to face, and it is the Spirit who turns lights on in a person and He does not do it in order to indict them.
I am not going to promise it stops
The honest part now, and I am not going to do what somebody probably did once meaning well.
I am not telling you the sorries will be gone in three months. I do not know that. For some people a reflex like this thins out fast once the reading changes. For others it takes years and gets quieter rather than absent. There is no timetable in Scripture and I am not going to invent one to give this a neater ending than the truth.
What I will tell you is that the reflex was never what made the pardon real, so it has never been able to unmake it. You were cleared by a finished work and not by a settled nervous system, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what holds that up on a day when your mouth is running its old program.
And here is what you are allowed to do, and I do not think anybody has offered it. You are allowed to say the true thing out loud immediately after the next unnecessary sorry. Not instead of it. After it. That is not pretending, because pretending would be telling your friends you have stopped. Saying the verdict right on the heels of the reflex is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the court and the truth about the kitchen in the same ten seconds.
So here is what is happening the next time you say sorry to a chair.
You are going to say the verdict out loud straight after it. Not instead of it, and not when you have got the reflex under control. Right behind it, out loud, in the kitchen with nobody there.
You are forgiven right now, as you read this, and Hebrews 9 says the blood of Christ purifies our conscience from dead works to serve the living God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that purifying and not your self-monitoring. And expect the next sorry to arrive on schedule, because if you wait until the reflex is under control before you speak, you have handed the verdict to your nervous system and given it a vote that was never issued.
You have a standing that does not consult your reflexes, and it is written that by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what makes that a fact about a twenty-six year old in her own kitchen. Six years of forty a day has not amended it by one word.
And do the ordinary things too. A reflex this size, this constant, is worth taking to a counselor, and that is not a downgrade of faith, it is the same instinct as seeing a doctor about a cough that will not clear. Say all of it out loud to one real person this week, in daylight, the friend who has started gently pointing it out and who plainly loves you. If it has gone heavier than a habit, if you have thought about ending your life, call or text 988 in the United States, or your local emergency number or crisis line, today. That is not weak faith. That is a sensible person getting hands on it, and God is not disappointed in you for it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these in the kitchen with nobody there. You have the standing because Christ is in you, and Scripture says this authority came as a gift and not as a reward for six clean years. The Holy Spirit is what carries them, not how convincing you sound, and you may sound like somebody reading a label. And whatever He does next, and when, is entirely His, in His own way and in His timing, which is exactly why these get said right on the heels of a reflex.
- Reflex that says sorry before I think, you are a feeling and not a finding, in the name of Jesus. It is written that the blood of Christ purifies the conscience from dead works, and that verse is addressed to a cleared person whose conscience is still talking.
- Reading that makes a reflex a verdict, get out of this kitchen. Scripture says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and a nervous system has never once sat on a bench in any court that counts.
- Lord, You have been in this kitchen for every one of the forty and You have never once flinched at any of them. It is written that You purify the conscience to serve the living God, and I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit says perfected and my mouth says something else, and I am going with You.
Hebrews 9:14
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