Look before you leap - an apology

I use my blog as a way of reflecting on my emotional reactions to things, usually to critique my own emotional response and think about how God speaks into it and this blog has therefore been a form of putting my personal journal out there for others to read in the hope they can draw encouragement from it. It has therefore become something of a habit to publish my internal processing via this medium.

However, I have been gently and justly rebuked that critiquing a pastoral conversation via the medium of blogpost is not necessarily the best way to build unity in the church. Having reflected I completely agree. I wrote about my discomfort with my friend’s advice (see previous blogpost) as a means of helping me understand why it made me uncomfortable but the right thing would then have been to discuss it with my friend rather than publish in a public medium something that was at best implicitly critical. The fact that I anonymised my friend, that she is not easily offended and that I thought she was unlikely to read it, which felt sufficient at the time, on reflection was not.

I also should acknowledge that although that one very brief conversation was the springboard for my previous post and that I believe that the post does reflect a problem within British Christian culture, the ideas and feelings I walked away with from that conversation and which I then went on to blog about were not reflective of the character and ministry of the individual in general and that I should have had some grounds for questioning whether I had understood them correctly. I was therefore unjust, and even if I had been the only person to know about whom, it still matters.  

I’ve discussed it with the person involved, apologised (although they were gracious enough not to be personally offended) and we have agreed that although I won’t withdraw the post as it may contain some helpful ideas I will add this commentary both as an apology and as a corrective.

The moral of the story is that sometimes a private journal should stay a private journal because for our growth as Christians personal relationships are what matter the most.