When I watched the movie Lincoln, I kept thinking about how amazing it was that he never apologized for doing whatever it took for him to get the votes necessary to pass the 13th amendment that ended slavery.  For some reason it called to mind the Biblical parable of the unjust steward.  If you see the movie, you may get what I mean.  The parable can be found in Luke 16:1-13.  In it, the steward is commended for doing some underhanded schemes to basically save himself.  Now I am not putting Lincoln in that light.  I just thought about how he did some things that were considered “illegal” to turn the country toward what he saw as a higher law.  And he did so nonapologetically.  It was this that caused me to think of Jesus’ words, “For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light. And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon, that when you fail, they may receive you into an everlasting home.”  He also advised his disciples,“Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

There are people out there who benefit from a broken system that makes some of us worth more than others.  That system is a lie.  And yet so many of us are convinced of it that even when the system is not in our favor, we perpetuate it, because we hope that someday we will benefit from it. We need to wake up.  Those of us who are trying to call people into the light need to wake up too.  We need to be wise as serpents like Lincoln was. I am apologizing because in my opinion the worst thing that anyone can do to themselves or to the world is feel sorry for themselves and I have done that.  In my heart I know that everyone is innocent, but the fact is that not everyone knows that about themselves and as a result they will act out what they believe about themselves and others into the world.

For years I talked at people who believed what the world told them about themselves essentially screaming the equivalent of, “You’re Innocent.  You’re Innocent”, hoping that they would hear me and live into that possibility.  The dream I mentioned in the video pretty much describes where that technique led me–nowhere.  What happened most often was that the person would turn on me.I started feeling sorry myself when I finally accepted that if you try to take away some people’s object of blame, they will just project it onto you. Still I  tried to maintain a consciousness that everyone was innocent without saying as much.  I’ve now come to the point where I see that this doesn’t work either.  I’m moving on to a different approach as described in the video which begins with openly apologizing for my sorriness.  Before I was telling everyone they were innocent, but I didn’t say it to myself.  Maybe they weren’t convinced because on some level I wasn’t.  Let’s see what happens.