In 2006 I wrote a column on forgiveness and why it’s the hardest thing we ever do, accounting for why we hardly do it.

Recent currents in American life have shifted my focus to that correlative activity to forgiving: apologizing. Apologizing is surely the runner-up for the most difficult of human activities, and I would venture this reason: Your problem in forgiving is my problem in apologizing.

I was at a homeless shelter in San Diego, trailing a gruff nonprofit CEO around, when I met Liz, a 24-year-old woman with ashy blond hair and a bright smile.

For more than seven months, Liz had been living in a tent in one of the roughest parts of town due to some mental health issues. Liz may have been sleeping on the concrete pavement and gotten her cell phone, handbags, and clothes stolen, but it seemed nobody had been able to steal her confidence in her God-given beauty.

“You want to see something beautiful?” she asked.

The first time I met John, he did not care for God. “Where is God?” he cried, looking up into the smog-washed Los Angeles night sky. “Where is He in all this chaos?”

His life, he knew, was not an upstanding one, even though he had once donned a blue-and-white sailor suit to sing in his church’s boys’ choir. Today, at age 61, John is homeless, pickled with decades of alcoholism, and alternating between anger and apathy toward God. He wonders how, if there truly is a God, He could sit back and watch all the devastation unfolding in the world He created.

Many years ago, I attended two funerals within 10 months, both for young men I didn’t know. I went for their mothers’ sakes. One was a suicide, and the pastor did his best to hang his eulogy on the scattered pegs of hope the boy left behind. By the grace of God, there were some. The other was a motorcycle accident.

This young man—I’ll call him Jason—was not reckless or negligent. According to his obituary, the truck he ran into “failed to yield.”

It’s difficult to add to the volumes already being written about evangelist Billy Graham after his death on Wednesday at age 99. The week ahead will bring more reflections as Graham’s coffin lies in repose at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., and then at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.

In recent months, the so-called “Billy Graham rule” reappeared in the American lexicon with stories about how Vice President Mike Pence followed Graham’s example of not being alone with any woman who wasn’t his wife. 

Basketballer Kobe Bryant wore numbers 8 and 24 during his 20 years with the Los Angeles Lakers. The week before Christmas, ESPN exuberantly reported a ceremony during which “the Lakers great had both of his numbers retired, and they will hang in the Staples Center rafters forever.”

No, they won’t. Someday that arena will fall down or be torn down.

Romance novelist Tessa Dare has one of her characters say, “I’m going to build that house with my own hands, from the foundation to the roof. I’m going to do it for us, and I’m going to do it right, so it lasts forever.”

There are things God commands us to do that it seems He can’t possibly mean literally, until we encounter a person who has actually done them. Praise God for such individuals! This is the power of testimony. Testimonies are a sermon plus. They convey God’s will but also flesh it out in ways unambiguous and inescapable for the rest of us.