Step 9 Mending Fences Part 2 

Trevor Hudson poses a simple question: 

If someone steals something precious or valuable from you and then apologises and asks you to forgive him or her, but keeps it for themselves not returning it or offering to replace it, how would you feel? Would you accept the apology?  Would you feel that he or she is genuinely sorry? Probably not.  An important ingredient is missing: Restitution. Restoration. Making Amends. 

In our Old Testament passage today from Leviticus 6:1-7, the passage is very clear that within ancient Israelite culture if one realised one was guilty of something that damaged a relationship with another person, then restoration was necessary.  In this passage, interestingly, there is no mention of making and apology.  There is no mention of asking for forgiveness. All that is asked of a person in this passage is a recognition of guilt, a restoration of what has been lost, or broken, and a ritual offering as an outward religious sign of re-connecting or restoring that persons relationship not just with the injured person, but also with the Divine. A recognition that our broken relationships with others leave us feeling disconnected from the Divine and one could say, from life itself. 

The ancient writer of Leviticus clearly recognised that apologies and requests for forgiveness are cheap, empty and meaningless. What is required is a clear and unambiguous effort to make amends. 

And that brings us to Step 9 on the 12 Step Program. 

Last week’s Sermon was entitled “Mending Fences Part 1” in which we explored Step 8 which invited us first to make a list of all the people we have hurt or harmed, and secondly to become willing to make amends. 

If you’re going to mend a broken fence, first you have to recognise which fences are broken, and then have the will to mend them.  That was Step 8. 

Step 9 is now a commitment to following through on that intention. It reads:  We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 

Step 8 was the preparation to make amends.  Step 9 is the commitment to actually do so. 

The Gospel of Luke has a wonderful story of a person expressing the courage to make amends, because making amends takes an enormous amount of courage.  It is the story of Zacchaeus, the dodgy tax-collector, who had amassed great wealth for himself by over-charging the people of Jericho in their taxes.  Upon meeting Jesus, without any prompting from Jesus, he is moved to make amends. We read in verse 8 “But he stood up and said to Jesus: ‘If I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will repay back four times the amount’.  

Trevor Hudson writes that Zacchaeus’s new spiritual experience having encountered Jesus and having been accepted by him and called by name by Jesus was accompanied by a deep desire to make restitution, to put right what he had done wrong.  He knew that there was no such thing as a private salvation deal with God. He had done wrong things to people that he needed to put right. 

And so as Trevor writes, restitution begins when we make a conscious decision to face those whom we have wronged.  These people might include our spouses, parents, children, brothers and sisters and close friends.  They may also include people we don’t even like, those with whom we don’t communicate, and even some whom we consider our enemies. Step 9 invites us to go to them, if it is at all possible, to acknowledge the hurt we have caused and to explain our desire to make amends. 

Last week I shared how early in his ministry Trevor’s tendency to over-work and over-commit and his constant absence from home had caused hurt and damage in his marriage to his wife Debbie.   In making amends he writes how he sat down with her, apologised to her for neglecting their relationship and then explained his intention to put things right.  He suggested, if she were willing, that he would take her out every Monday night from then on and depending on the budget it would be for either a milkshake or a pizza. It is a practice that has continued through the years.  He comments that making restitution in that instance has been a lot of fun. 

But sometimes, he acknowledges, it may not be enjoyable at all.  He tells of a friend who had a gambling addiction and had defrauded the company where he worked of large sums of money.  When he began to awaken to the spiritual dimension of his life, he realised that he needed to come clean and to put right what he had done wrong.  

He spoke to his boss, admitted his wrong-doing and then offered to repay the money with interest on a monthly basis.  It was a long, hard and costly journey, but having done it he came to experience a freedom and serenity that he had never known before.  Despite the difficulty it was worth it. 

Trevor acknowledges however that not all attempts to make amends will necessarily have a happy ending.  Some may be too angry with us and therefore not be receptive.  Others may have been too deeply hurt to want to re-engage with us. And in these instances he suggests one can only take solace in the fact that we have tried our best. Step 9 recognises the limitations to making direct amends.  It asks only that we make amends wherever possible. 

In some instances a person may have died, or live elsewhere or not traceable.  In such cases we can only make what can be called ‘indirect amends’ by committing ourselves to living a life of integrity as much as possible from that moment on, committing ourselves to becoming less selfish, less controlling and more loving. Trevor suggests that in doing so, we are saying to those we have hurt and to those to whom we may not have immediate access, ‘I recognise that I have hurt you, but through my new way of life, I am seeking to make it up to you indirectly’. 

Lastly, Step 9 suggests that there are times when making direct amends is not advisable. It says we are to make direct amends wherever possible to those we have harmed, ‘except when to do so would injure them or others.’ In other words, if there is any possibility that we will cause even greater harm, we must think twice before we go ahead. It would be wrong to expose somebody else to even more suffering just so that we can ease our own conscience. Obviously this will require being mindful of other people and especially innocent parties and the impact of bringing something potentially damaging out into the open. 

So much more could be said regarding for example the right timing when making amends, the right approach, and even the right measures and those complicated scenarios when we might end up doing more harm than good. All of these will ultimately be determined by our attempt to put ourselves in the other persons shoes.  This is about moving beyond concern for self and about asking what will be best, most helpful and most healing for the ones that I have harmed. 

But maybe we are still not ready to make amends. Trevor suggests that the best way to start is to start with the small things and to build momentum from there. Small victories might give us the courage to tackle the bigger ones. He also points us to the Big Book of AA which reminds us of the huge benefits of restitution.  It says that when we make amends we will not regret the past nor wish to close the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace… Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us… We will suddenly realise that God [The Great Wisdom of Life] is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Amen. 

And so I leave these thoughts with you again as some food for thought for us to consider on our own individual journeys. 

Mending Fences  (Part 1)  
One Day at a Time - 12 Steps for Everyone.

Trevor Hudson tells how he once took part in a group discussion on the question: In which area of life have you failed the most? 

He says that his answer was not long in coming.  It was not in the academic arena, nor in the sporting, or the vocational or the financial.  He says that while he had certainly blown it more than once in each of those areas, they are not the biggest failures.  By contrast he says that his biggest failures in life have been in his relationships.  He says that he cannot believe how many times he has let down his family, his friends and his colleagues through either things he has done or things he has failed to do. 

He remembers one particularly painful moment in his marriage.  It was early on in his ministry. He had just taken responsibility for his first congregation.  Keen to succeed, he worked long, hard hours. Outwardly he says things were going well.  Attendances and finances were both up and there were even plans to build a new church building.  

But his marriage was not doing so well at all. He was often away from home or out late. He was denying the person closest to him the attention, time and energy necessary for real communication and caring.  And then one night he came home to find a note next to his bedside table which read: ‘Trevor, I love you and want to be married to you. I sometimes worry though that one day I may no longer be worried if you don’t come home. I miss you and want to reconnect. Debbie.’

Trevor asks: Have you ever experienced similar moments of failure in your relationships? 

The truth is he suggests, if you have character flaws, then it is inevitable that you have. We all have.   Because our character flaws don’t only harm us, they inevitably harm others as well, especially those who are closest to us.  It could be our desire to be in control, our explosive temper, our selfishness, our long held resentments, our not speaking the whole truth, our deep seated prejudices, our wanting everything to be perfect around us, or as in Trevor's case our tendency to over-commit ourselves and to take on too much.  

Step 8 suggest that if we are going to grow spiritually, which is just another way of speaking of growing to human maturity, it is going to be important to take responsibility for the ways in which our character flaws impact other people, creating bruised and broken relationships and making whatever amends are possible.  

Step 8 reads:  We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

There are two parts to Step 8. -
1. making a list of people we have harmed.
2. becoming willing to make amends. 

In making a list of all the people we have harmed we are invited to shine a light on all of our relationships both past and present. To reflect on our relationships. To remember the faces of those we have hurt. To write down their names. To think carefully about what it was that we did or did not do that harmed them. And consider what effect we may have had on them?

Trevor says, this will be a difficult task for when things do go wrong in our relationships our normal response is to want to justify ourselves, to become defensive, to insist that we were in the right, to make excuses for ourselves and to blame the other person. The last thing we want to do is to admit that we may have done something wrong.  We would much rather focus on how others have wronged us and how we have been the victim. 

Step 8 invites us to buck the trend. To turn it around and to challenge this deep-seated tendency to focus on our own victimhood. 

It is not to say that other people don’t have their own stuff that they need to take responsibility for. Of course they do. But we can only take responsibility for our own actions. And if we wish to grow we have to start with ourselves and Step 8 encourages us to do that by making a list. Who have I harmed in my thoughts, words or actions, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do?

Are there people who immediately come to mind? Can we find the courage to write their names down on a list? Can we describe in a few words next to their name what it was we did? Can we add a few words to describe the effect this may have had one them?

The second part of Step 8 is about becoming willing to make amends. I know in my own life where I have felt I have needed to make amends, it has felt like the last thing in the world that I actually wish to do.  It can feel like a mountain too big to climb. How do we become willing? 

We can become aware of some of the benefits of doing so and I mention 3 in particular: 

Firstly making amends can help us deal with our feelings of guilt, remorse, shame, failure, resentment, anger and even hatred.  Do you carry with you any of these painful feelings?  How would you feel if those could be removed? That is what making amends can do. It can help release us from the grip of past failures and the emotional baggage that we carry around because of them. 

Secondly, making amends can improve our health.  It is becoming clearer and clearer in the medical profession that carrying around unresolved emotional baggage can end up doing terrible harm to our health. When we make amends and are released from some of this emotional baggage and find ourselves living in more harmonious relationships with us because broken fences have been mended, we feel lighter in ourselves and this can have an impact on improving our health. 

Thirdly, making amends can help us reconnect with a sense of joy. Broken relationships and the emotional baggage we carry around with us as a result of things we have done is probably one of the things, more than any other, that robs us of our joy. 

In 2022, on our trip back to South Africa, I felt the need to make amends. 4 years previously, when I had sold my car to a neighbour I felt afterwards that I had overcharged him. I had done my research and charged a price that other cars with similar mileage and age were priced.  But there were other factors that I hadn’t considered such as the fact that the car had been in an accident and two of the doors were not original.   For 4 years this had sat uneasily within me and during that time I thought numerous times about how to put that right.  In the end I realised that it was robbing me of my peace of mind.  And though it took a lot of courage, I decided to phone him and pay him back some of the money I had received from him.   It felt painful giving the money back.  But afterwards I was grateful to be free of the uneasiness I had felt within me for about 4 years.  

There are good reasons to make amends.  If we remind ourselves of them, it can help us to become willing to make amends.  Restoring one’s inner peace is a very compelling reason to become willing to make amends. 
Next week we explore actually making amends… today is simply about making a list of people we have harmed and about becoming willing in our hearts to make amends:   

I end with two verses of Scripture: 

Proverbs 14:9 Fools mock at making amends for sin, but goodwill is found among the upright.

Matthew 5:23-24 So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 

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Ready for Change?

Step Six  We were entirely ready to have God (Higher Power) remove all these defects of character. 

In John 5, we read the fascinating story about a man who has been paralysed for 38 years. We find him lying next to the pool of Bethesda which was believed to have healing powers. But the proviso is you needed to be the first in when the waters stirred.  We read that he had no-one to help him in and so someone else would always get in ahead of him… that story sounds hauntingly similar to trying to phone in to get an appointment at the local doctors surgery.  Who can get in there first. 

Jesus, seeing the man then asks him an interesting question: Do you want to be made well?

Why does Jesus ask that question? Surely after 38 years of being afflicted by his ailment the man wants to be made well? Surely everyone wants to be made well? 

But in the story Jesus seems to have deeper insight into what actually makes human beings tick.  If truth be told… not everyone necessarily wishes to be made well. 

Growing up in South Africa it was a common thing to see people begging on the streets. Unemployment is high because there are not enough jobs to go around.  It is extremely rare to see a sign outside a business indicating a vacancy.  It was one of the things that shocked Wends and I when we first arrived in the UK.  Jobs were and are freely available.  They may not always pay well, but there are there for the taking.  Not so in South Africa. If you have even a very low paying job you are one of the lucky ones.  And there is little to no social support for the unemployed and for those who have disabilities that prevent them from working.  Today you would receive a maximum of around £100 per month in South Africa as a disability grant.  During the Apartheid years things would have been even worse if you were a person of colour. 

Growing up in South Africa in a town called Pinetown (about the size of Lisburn), I remember a man who would sit in the main street begging.  He had what is commonly called elaphantitus… His one leg was swollen large, a bit like an elephants, and it had rough nodules or warts and often looked raw and to constantly oozed with fluid and blood. It was a very unpleasant sight to see. And also not a very pleasant thing to smell when walking past.  I struggle to imagine what it was like for the man himself. 

Interestingly, at some point we had heard that someone in the community had offered to pay so that he could get his leg medically treated.  During apartheid in South Africa, the healthcare system was deeply segregated and discriminatory, with people of colour facing significant challenges in accessing medical care. 

Unexpectedly we heard that, he had declined the offer to receive medical treatment. One can only speculate what his reasons might have been? Probably first among them was that prospects of financial security with a healthy leg were in fact less favourable for him and by implication his family than if his condition was  left untreated. Would he even be able to get a job in a country where job’s especially for the lowest paid are scarce.  And if he got a job, would he ever earn as much money for his family if he was made well? 

It is a distressing story but it does illustrates the fact that Jesus question to the man in John 5 was in fact quite insightful.  As human beings, we don’t always want to get well, whether that be physically or emotionally because sometimes there is a pay off of one kind or another for remaining unwell.  

And that takes us to the 6th Step on the 12 Step Program.  Over the course of October and November we were exploring the 12 Step program, and we got up to Step 5.  A quick recap of the first 5 Steps might be helpful: 

In Step 1 we were invited to identify that one issue or struggle in our lives that we feel powerless over and that makes our lives feel unmanageable. 

In Step 2 we were invited to consider the possibility of a Higher Power that can restore us to wholeness, balance and sanity.  Some might call that Higher Power God, others might call it their Higher Self, some who are not conventionally religious might speak of the Universe as their Higher Power. 

In Step 3 we were invited to hand over the care of our wills and our lives to that Higher Power, or God, as we understand God. 

In Step 4 we were invited to take a moral inventory of ourselves, listing as honestly as possible our virtues as well as our weaknesses. 

In Step 5 we were invited to admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. 

And today in Step 6 we are invited to ask of ourselves if we entirely ready to have our character defects removed?  

In essence, the 6th Step is asking of us the same question that Jesus asked the paralysed man. Do we want to be made well? 

It sounds quite passive… asking God to remove our character defects from, but that wording is important in the 12 step program because in Step 1 we admitted that we were powerless over some part of our life. In other words, we had tried to change some aspect of our lives and found ourselves repeatedly failing. 

Sometimes we have dysfunctions that go deeper than our ability to change them ourselves… Sometimes we need help. Perhaps we need help often than we would like to admit.

But the bottom line of Step 6 is the question Jesus asks the paralytic, “Do you want to be made well?” Do we really want to change? Are we entirely ready to have our dysfunctional thinking and behaviour changed? 

In other words, the bottom line is simple change begins with a willingness and a desire to do so. How willing are we? How much do we desire it?   Am I entirely ready to have my character defects removed, or have I grown quite attached to them? 

Trevor Hudson makes the point that being entirely ready to have one’s character flaws removed does not mean that we are suddenly going to become perfect people. Far from it. He reminds us that even Paul, the author of much of the New Testament, battled with his weaknesses until the day he died. He says that it goes without saying that to be human is to be imperfect. We grow and mature throughout our lives. But what it means to be entirely ready to have our character defects removed means is that we are fully prepared to give up any destructive pattern of thought or behaviour that is stopping our spiritual progress, and thus it is a statement of our openness and willingness to change. 

Trevor Hudson gives an illustration.  He asks the question, ‘What is the first thing that we need to do if we want to buy and new car? Some might suggest going to a local car dealership or looking online for car sales websites. But he suggests that even before we start looking at dealerships and car sales websites, right at the outset we need to be entirely ready to give up driving the old car.  Only then will we be able to start out on the journey towards acquiring a new one. 

He says it is exactly the same when it comes to wanting to change ourselves. We can only change when we are entirely ready to do so. 

Dr. Phil however suggests that often we hang onto our dysfunctional behaviour and thinking because we get some kind of a reward for it.  Perhaps we are attached to our dysfunctions because they give us an excuse to not grow because growing can feel like an overwhelming task.  Perhaps we are attached to our dysfunctions because through them we hope to receive sympathy from others.  Or perhaps we hang on to them because they might be familiar and provide a sense of comfort and security. Change can be uncomfortable and uncertain and so we resist it because we are not sure what it is going to ask of us? We have a fear of the unknown. 

Others may hang onto their dysfunctional behaviour and thinking because of denial and a lack of awareness of just how destructive our dysfunctions are. For others there may be short-term benefits in dysfunctional thinking and behaviour such as a temporary escape from stress or discomfort which may lead us to prioritise immediate relief over long-term well being.  

For others there may be social reinforcement.  We fear criticism or rejection if we were to change and sometimes friends and family members are invested in us remaining the way we are.  They do not wish us to change, because it might mean change for them too.  Sometimes we resist changing our dysfunctional behaviour because we just haven’t yet learned healthier alternatives and we don’t even know what those might look like. 

There are a lot of reasons why we are not always entirely ready to give up our character defects or dysfunctional thinking and behaviour. And so, how can we get to this point?  What if we are still very attached to our dysfunctional patterns of thinking and behaviour? 

Trevor Hudson suggests that a few things might help: 

    I. We can begin by imagining what life might look like if we did change? How might my life be positively  different if my dysfunctional patterns were removed?  A positive picture of the future can inspire us to change in the present. 
    II. We can think about the pain that our character defects cause to ourselves and others. What impact do my dysfunctional patterns and character defects have on others, especially those we love and cherish. How might their lives be different if I was different? 
    III. We can consider what the future might look like if we do not let go of our character defects. How bad might things get? Who or what might I lose If I stubbornly refuse to give up my dysfunctional behaviour and thinking?
    IV. Lastly, if we are still not entirely ready to change, Trevor suggests we can ask God, or our Higher Power, or even our Higher Self to create that desire within us. 

What is interesting about Step 6 is that it is not yet a Step in which we actually engage in trying to make changes.  It is not even a Step in which we ask God or our Higher Power or Higher Self to actually change us… that will be left for Step 7.  

Step 6 is the prior step where we are invited to consider if we really want change to happen at all? In the words of Jesus “Do I want to be made well?” We are not talking physically. We are talking about a wellness of spirit. “Do I want to be made well in my spirit and in my relationships?