Being humble doesn’t mean being a wimp. Being truly humble leads one to do hard things simply because it’s the right thing to do. I witnessed that in church today when a man publicly owned his mistakes and did his best to make up for them.
First a little background. My church is a lay church. No one at the local and regional level gets paid for their efforts; we all have our regular jobs and lives, and our church service is volunteer. For example, our previous Stake President, who oversees six congregations, is a branch manager for the bank I work for. The current one is a CEO for a kitchen-wares company. The leader of our local congregation is an IT engineer, and the leader of our men’s auxiliary drives a Fedex truck.
This also means our teachers are laypersons. This presents some interesting situations sometimes, as there can be temptation to deviate from the church-approved curriculum. This happened last Sunday when our adult Sunday School teacher detoured the lesson into an area that left many of us feeling a little unsettled. It hadn’t been all that relevant to the topic of the lesson, and seemed to be more designed to show off the instructor’s gospel scholarship. This happens from time to time, and as a general rule I don’t worry too much about it.
This week before the lesson began, this brother got up and apologized to everyone for his error of the previous week. He had felt unsettled about it himself, evidently, and it had bothered him the rest of the day. He had come to the conclusion that he had been introducing his own thoughts instead of the assigned the material and felt he owed us all an apology.
That couldn’t have been easy to do.
I don’t now the full story. Perhaps someone in authority took him aside and gave him some negative feedback. Perhaps he came to it entirely on his own. I may never know, and ultimately it doesn’t matter. His apology was sincere, and given before a room full of his peers. My respect for this man has increased significantly. He owned his error, and he made amends without any attempt to justify or excuse himself.
That is incredibly rare these days. At best we usually get passive-voiced non-apologies, such as “mistakes were made, and I regret that some people were offended.” This was nothing like that. It was a straight-up, “I made a mistake, and I’m sorry.”
I don’t even remember what it was he had said last week. It hadn’t been a bad lesson, other than the section that seemed off track. But I’ll tell you what, it may be a long time before I experience a lesson quite as effective and memorable as his two-minute apology today.
Yup. That takes guts.