October 16, 2008

On accountability

One big difference between the Catholic me and non-Catholic me is
holding myself accountable for my words (the good and the bad!). Although I was never a bad person, when I was loose with my tongue (which is all too easy on the internet), I never really felt bad about it, and I certainly didn't apologize. After all, the person usually deserved it, so why should I? It was certainly much easier than apologizing, too. Apologizing is embarrassing, frankly.

I'm certainly not perfect, but when I find myself in those situations now, I pray, then I swallow my pride and apologize. Sometimes the apology is accepted and sometimes it isn't, but that's really irrelevant. If my words have hurt someone it's not only an offense against them, but against God. We all have inherent worth and dignity because we are created and loved by God, so to strike with cruel and careless remarks is to strike against God.



2 comments:

Anne Marie said...

Interesting topic. This is one of the things I feel I need to work on right now. Not so much that I lose me temper, but that I need to work on loving those whom I wouldn’t otherwise love. The best I can muster at the moment is a cool neutrality which is not exactly loving. Jenny at The Great Deception has a post about seeing the person on the other side of the pro life debate that has similar overtones.

Katie said...

Boy I'm glad that made sense,I was half asleep and just had to edit it for clarity!

I hear you, the loving part is really, really hard. I'm also a cold neutrality person much of the time, which is certainly better than seething hatred, but still not where I'd like to be.