A sincere apology can bring color back when the world looks gray

I was waiting for my food at a restaurant early Monday morning when one of the employees came over to the counter to talk with me.

“I need to apologize to you for how I acted the other day,” she said quietly.

I was surprised, but I knew exactly what she was talking about. The last time I had seen her, she had been pretty rude. About five minutes after the place was supposed to be open that previous day — and after a couple of orders had been filled at the drive-through — I knocked on the drive-through window to let someone know the doors were still locked.

She was annoyed and she made that obvious. She and the other employees hadn’t gotten everything done before opening. There was stress or tension going on. She angrily blamed someone else at one point. She snapped at me a couple of times — as though I was somehow responsible.

I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t make a big deal about it. I just left and silently groused about how I had been treated.

And now — two days later — she was apologizing in a way that made it clear that she was sincere. She had clearly been bothered by the way she had acted.

I downplayed the incident and accepted the apology, but I felt something odd. Even though this woman had been a complete stranger two days before — and even though our primary interaction had been negative — I now felt very positive toward her.

I felt as though we shared some sort of simple human bond. I felt as though I liked her and cared about her.

And it was all because she had had the courage and character to confess what she had done wrong and ask me to forgive her.

I’ve been thinking about that all week. I think it’s because we live in a society in which people make perfunctory apologies all the time. People say or do offensive things and they make apologies that aren’t sincere, but are purely performative.

But this woman was sincere. It wasn’t a big public thing. Her bosses never found out about it, so she wasn’t being forced to make a contrived apology.

She simply had a personal value that said, “I was wrong — and I need to make this right.”

There have been plenty of times in the past when I’ve said or done things to others that I regretted. In some of those cases, I’ve made amends. In other cases, I’ve had too much pride to confess that I’d been wrong and ask forgiveness.

As I thought about a few specific times when I had acted poorly, I felt as though this restaurant worker was putting me to shame. It wasn’t intentional on her part, of course, but she was providing me with a beautiful and sincere blueprint that I ought to follow more often.

When things happen to cause a rupture in a relationship, we can feel as though the world around us has suddenly become dull and gray and lifeless. If the rupture isn’t repaired in time, the relationship can die, even if the break was over something small and absurd.

But when someone is willing to accept responsibility for his or her actions — and make a sincere apology — it can feel as though color and life have come back into the world. And that can change everything.

There was nothing complicated about what this woman did Monday.

She was wrong. She knew it. And she fixed it.

We make life far more broken than it has to be when we refuse to do the same.