The Blame Game

I came across an old comic strip the other day “Frank and Ernest.” It was simply a drawing of Noah’s ark with the animals lined up getting on board two by two. Noah says to Ms. Noah, “Two each of everything, except we’ll take as many scapegoats as we can get!”

In life, we like scapegoats, don’t we? When things go wrong, we like to have something or someone else to blame. “It’s not my fault!,” we like to say. 

All the way back to Adam and Eve, when God asked Adam why he ate the forbidden fruit, what did he do? He blamed it on Eve, of course. Eve, in turn, blamed it on the serpent!

We are human. We’re flesh and blood. From time to time we all make mistakes. We all fall short. But don’t we grow more as human beings when we face up to our mistakes and failures and when we accept the consequences and learn from them?

Let us pray: Loving God, we thank you that you know us, inside and out. You know our challenges, our shortcomings, our failures, and yet, you love us still. Help us to look at our own lives with gentle honesty – and yet much love. Where we fall short, give us grace, give us compassion for ourselves, remind us of the need for forgiveness, but then O God, give us the courage and strength we need to seek solutions – not blame. We ask in the name of the One whose love for us never dies. Amen.