Kirkepiscatoid

That it may please thee to give us true repentance; to forgive
us all our sins, negligences, and ignorances; and to endue
us with the grace of thy Holy Spirit to amend our lives
according to thy holy Word,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

True repentance. Hmmm.

I had a lot of trouble with the word “repent” until I learned more about the etymology of the word, that it comes from the word, “to turn.” So in my mind, “true repentance” doesn’t just mean “turn,” it means “turn and walk towards.” Make a move in a Godward direction (to steal from the title of my friend Tobias’ blog.)

Then we ask forgiveness in this stanza...not just for our sins, the things we know we did, not just for our “sins left undone” (our negligence) but for even one more thing—the things we did wrong that we were too dumb to know we even did anything wrong, and may never find out about. Things like complaining about something at work and little did you know that the person who poured their heart out in the thing you are complaining about was standing right there. Those sorts of things.

I used to be so not into asking forgiveness for things “I was too dumb to know I did” but being a laboratory director changed all that.

When you run a hospital clinical laboratory, if one of your phlebotomists draws the wrong person and the person who needed a transfusion gets the wrong type of blood, and the patient gets sick or dies as a result of it, guess what? In the eyes of the law, YOU, the laboratory director, are “at fault.” Now YOU didn’t draw the blood. YOU didn’t mis-identify the patient. You might have had an in-service on “patient safety errors in phlebotomy” the day before, but if this happens, and there is a lawsuit, they are not going to sue the phlebotomist; there’s nothing to be gained there. They are going to sue the hospital and the laboratory director, because it was YOUR responsibility. All laboratory directors are very cognizant that “the buck stops at the Laboratory Director.”

Well, it’s not an exact analogy but it is close enough that you get the drift.

I was also thinking about how when we ask forgiveness, are we asking in a true sense of repentance, or are we asking “just to make this difficult thing go away.” If we are just asking for the most expedient, heuristic way to get out of our jam, we are not truly entering with a “spirit of repentance.” We have to have the courage to realize that we can’t just be forgiven, we have to walk towards what we need to do to get right with this difficulty, even if it hurts and even if it knocks us down a little. It’s a hard task!