Sorry

Earlier this week, on Monday night, facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all suffered a 6 hour outage. If you logged on to any of these platforms, which are all run by the same company, you couldn’t load anything. The servers were down, and you couldn’t get a decent connection. 

Eventually the servers did come back, and Facebook issued an official apology saying, “People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.” 

I personally find these public apologies really interesting, because in our culture, it looks weak to say sorry. And actually, Facebook have done it in some very flowery language, but basically what they’re saying is “We messed up, we don’t know what happened, we’re sorry”. 

 My favourite example of this is Nick Clegg’s apology in 2012 after promising not to raise tuition fees. As we all know, the coalition government did raise tuition fees. I myself am very aware of this, as it made my university fees much more expensive. He says it very simply – “There’s no easy way to say this. We made a pledge, we didn’t stick to it, and for that I am sorry. When you’ve made a mistake, you should apologise.” 

Many people who voted for the lib dems before 2012 have not done so since, because of this tuition fee vote. But, I personally think it is really good that Nick Clegg said sorry. And I think it’s important that facebook have said sorry for their power outage. I think it’s important that food suppliers have apologised when breaks in the chain have affected supply. 

And it’s important that we say sorry to people who we’ve hurt, even if it feels pointless. But I think it’s even more important that we, as humans in God’s world, say sorry to God. In many ways we have lived as if God doesn’t exist. He is the great God who made this whole world, and we don’t give him the authority He deserves over our lives. So it’s right that we say sorry to God. If you believe in Him, why not turn to Him in prayer today and say sorry. 

I’ll leave you with Justin Bieber asking, “Is it too late now to say sorry”, to which the answer is, absolutely not. Have a great day

Matt Gurtler 8/10/2021