Why Do We Make Excuses Instead of Telling the Truth?

What is the best excuse you have heard lately?

An excuse is our attempt to be innocent without being honest. In decades of legal service, I heard many fine ones; the best I heard lately came from a child, and it was disarming precisely because it hid nothing. This reflection traces the history of excuses from Genesis to the present day. It arrives at a quiet conclusion: the most sophisticated excuse is still weaker than a plain confession met with grace. The truth, offered simply, has always been received more kindly than we fear.

What Was the World’s First Excuse — and Why Do We Still Use It?

From Eden onwards, the story of our excuses — and the grace that outgrows them

Today’s WordPress Daily Writing Prompt asks: “What is the best excuse you have heard lately?” Here is my answer — though to give it honestly, I must begin much further back than lately. I must begin at the very beginning.

 The First Excuse Ever Recorded

Long before the first invoice, the first traffic jam, or the first unfinished homework, there was the first excuse. It was offered in a garden, under questioning, by a man who had just eaten what he was told not to eat.

“The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12)

Notice the craftsmanship. In a single sentence, Adam blames the woman — and, more daringly, blames God Himself for having given her. The woman, in turn, blames the serpent. The serpent, having no one left to blame, says nothing. Humanity’s first recorded conversation after wrongdoing was not a confession. It was an excuse. And every excuse offered since has been, in some way, a footnote to that one.

A Short History of Fine Excuses

Scripture, read with an honest eye, is something of a museum of excuses. Moses, called to speak for God, protests that he is slow of speech and slow of tongue. Aaron, caught beside a golden calf of his own making, offers perhaps the most audacious excuse in the Old Testament: the people gave me gold, I threw it into the fire, “and out came this calf” (Exodus 32:24). Out came this calf — as though the idol had assembled itself while he stood by, astonished.

Centuries later, in one of Our Lord’s parables, invited guests decline a great banquet with excuses so polished they almost sound reasonable: one has bought a field, another five yoke of oxen, a third has just married (Luke 14:18–20). Each excuse is plausible. Each is also a refusal dressed in good manners.

The secular world has added its own classics — the dog that ate the homework, the alarm that failed to ring, the traffic that appeared from nowhere. The costumes change with every generation; the play remains the same. An excuse is our attempt to be innocent without being honest.

The Best Excuse I Have Heard Lately

And now to the prompt itself. The best excuse I have heard lately did not come from a courtroom or a committee room, though my years in the law have given me a rich anthology of both. It came from a small girl in a family gathering, caught with the tin of sweets that had been set aside for visitors.

Asked why she had opened it, she replied, with wide and earnest eyes: “I was only checking whether they were still good.”

The room dissolved into laughter, and her grandmother — the very authority she had offended — gathered her up and gave her one of the sweets anyway. That, I decided on the spot, was the best excuse I had heard in a long while. Not because it was clever, but because it was transparent. A child’s excuse hides nothing; it is a glass door, and everyone can see the truth smiling behind it.

Our adult excuses are more sophisticated, and that is precisely their trouble. We do not say “I was checking the sweets”; we say “I was under pressure,” “the circumstances were exceptional,” “anyone would have done the same.” The engineering is better, but the purpose is unchanged since Eden — to be found innocent without being found honest.

What God Did With the First Excuse

Here is the detail from Eden that I find most moving. God listened to Adam’s excuse and Eve’s excuse, saw through both instantly — and then, before sending them out of the garden, made garments of skin and clothed them (Genesis 3:21). The Judge who was not deceived became the Tailor who covered their shame. Justice was done, but tenderness had the last word.

That grandmother with the tin of sweets was, without knowing it, re-enacting something divine. She saw through the excuse and gave the sweet anyway. Grace does not pretend the excuse is true; grace makes the excuse unnecessary.

This, I believe, is where the prompt quietly deepens. The best excuse is ultimately the one we no longer need to make — because we have discovered that confession is safer than concealment. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9). Eden’s children reached for fig leaves and explanations. Heaven’s children may simply reach for mercy.

 So the next time an excuse rises to my lips — polished, plausible, and almost persuasive — I hope I will remember the little girl and the tin of sweets, the calf that “came out” of the fire, and the two ashamed figures in a garden being clothed by the very hands they had disappointed. The truth, offered plainly, has always been received more kindly than we fear.

What is the best excuse you have heard lately — and did it make you laugh, or did it make you think? I would love to read it in the comments.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 17 July 2026

K.John Britto

Rise & Inspire — where every sunrise brings a new reason to rise, and every word a new reason to hope.

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