Forgive and Forgave

Forgive:  To pardon, to waive any negative feeling or desire for punishment.  

A group of guys that I played basketball with back in high school got together for a little mini-reunion recently.  The name of our coach surfaced during the weekend.  His memory was not held in the highest regard.  While I stayed above the fray this time it was just a few years ago that I was leading the charge of the Criticism Brigade, being a hyper-sensitive, overly-immature adult.

This is a good group of men.  The criticism wasn't mean-spirited or gratuitous, and our coach was a pretty flawed guy.  It made me think about our Step 9 amends process and how freeing that can be.  When I was getting started with my amends the hardest thing was saying sorry and meaning it.  I'm good at saying: "I'm sorry."  I'm glad there's no Google translator chip embedded in my skull because the words would come out something like this: "I'm sorry that I'm in pain - I'm sorry that you caught me in bad behavior and I'd like the pain to go away.  Not strongly enough to change my bad behavior or to right a wrong but strongly enough that I can loose a few insincere words from my pie hole."

This is assuming I ever got to the "I'm sorry" part.  Usually I got bogged down telling you how my bad behavior was really your fault.  And god save us all on the rare occasions when someone really had behaved worse than I had.  Our literature uses the phrase "triumphantly seized" to describe what we do when we see bad behavior in others as a foil to our own.  I personally am a Zen Master of Detecting Defects In Others.  I am Blinded At Birth to seeing any of my own.

Specks in your eye, logs in mine.