There was a time when there was no reason in the world for regret. Everything people [well two people anyway] thought, desired, said and did was completely in accordance to the will of the Creator. Imagine, as a husband approaching his 30th wedding anniversary celebration, looking back on my marriage and not having a single thing to regret. Or being a parent sitting with our grown kids and reminiscing on our years of child-rearing and literally having nothing to regret. Imagine pondering our relationship with God over decades and having no regrets. Just remembering our every thought, word and deed without any guilt or remorse. As hard as it may be to believe, this was the way the Creation was originally intended to be and, in fact, once was.
But on that horrible day with the serpent in the Garden, the innocent beauty of the regretless world was shattered. And it still lies in pieces around us. There may be no more common human experience than regret. It follows us all the time. It stains the very sheets of our existence. We can close our eyes and pretend its not there, but every time we reopen them, we see the stains of regret everywhere. It marks even the best of our family moments, stains the sweetest of our romantic encounters, leaves spots on the best of our friendships and colors the most honorable of our intentions. It is literally inescapable. The idle word, the impulsive choice, or the wayward desire ... they all cause us regret. We wish we could take back choices. We wish we could grab our words out of the air. We wish we could relive situations and rewrite the scripts of our relationships. But we cannot. The leaves are off the trees, and regret is our harvest.
This is our world, a place where regret reigns. It is the classes in high school and early college that I blew off and did less than my best. It is the giving in to too many pizzas and snacks in my diet. It is the career that I have allowed to command too much of my time and energy and resulted in too much time away from home ... especially when my kids were young. It is the many ministry opportunities that I let slip through my fingers. It is even the times when I let the opinion of others too strongly influence me. It is spending way too many years in debt. It is the material things that I let command my eyes and control my heart. It is the big house that I had to have [Janna would be happy to live in a double-wide ... maybe even a single-wide] but that we didn't really "need." It is not enough time with my kids and too much time for me in my man-cave. It is too often being "too tired" or "too busy" for a consistent and meaningful devotional life with God. It is being driven too much by envy and motivated too much by greed. It is being too willing to respond to evil with evil. It is universally human while being intensely personal. Yes, we all live in a place where regret abides.
Yet, in the face of this crushing regret, we are not without hope. In fact, it is this very same regret that points us to our need. Beneath each moment of regret is a cry for a better place. The blues songs of regret call us to look for the joyful hymns on the other side. For there is coming a day when our last regret is felt and our final remorse will die. On the other side, there will no longer be any bad choices, unwise reactions, inappropriate thoughts or evil desires. In fact, that is the brightest and most wonderful of realities ... in eternity we will be delivered from our weakness and sin and therefore freed from regret. But for now, embedded in every mundane flash of regret and every heavy load of remorse is a deep and abiding longing for a better place, a place where failure gives way to victory and sin gives way to righteousness. Yet until that day, we have no choice really but to look back and feel the searing pain of regret.
And this is not something we just decide to do. Almost without even realizing it, we seem to slip from living like an astronaut to living like an archeologist. Our lifestyles while still young were all about launching with both courage and expectancy into worlds unknown. It was all about new trajectories, new locations and new discoveries. Distance between where we were and where we wanted to be didn't discourage us ... no, it more challenged us. We wanted every day to be different and we were not afraid of change. But as we get older we change occupations. We begin to realize that we are now living with a fundamentally different mentality than we had 20-30 years ago. We no longer launch toward what could be; now we spend more time uncovering and critiquing what once was. We begin to take an archeologist's approach to life.
And thus, midlife often becomes a long-term dig into the mounds of our existences, and it can often be difficult to face what we may uncover. This happens largely because we become progressively less able to convince ourselves that things will be different in the future or that we still have time to do things a different way. Our past progressively takes on more power than does our future. It can be discouraging work, but in our midlife years we all seem to be drawn to digging.
It also can be dangerous work, because the dig does not have scientific objectivity. We are uncovering deeply personal moments that can be fraught with drama and consequence. We begin to see ourselves as maybe we never have before. It can be a bit breathtaking and even a bit paralyzing. Some of us get stuck and never come back up out of our archeological hole. We want so much to be able to go back and walk the streets of our past. And thus the regrets have a tendency to just pile up one on top of the other.
So what are we to do? First of all, we must shatter once and for all our own myths of our personal righteousness. This is precisely where the Bible dissects and exposes midlife regret. The reason regret has such power to depress, derail and paralyze us is that regret calls us to not only confess that we have failed, but also to let go of the fantasies of our righteousness. The archeological work of midlife exposes fully just who we have been all along. The problem is that what has been exposed doesn't synch with who we thought we were over all these years. Scripture says that "if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" [1 John 1:8]. It says this because we are all too easily blinded to the depth and consistency of our sin. We repeatedly tend to underestimate just how susceptible our hearts are to living under rulership other than the Lord's. But He knows just how crucial it is for us to see things as they really are. So, as we brush the dirt off the artifacts of our lives, He puts us in a position to see that any good thing that we uncover is the result of His grace. And in this way, midlife can be an occasion of profound and lasting spiritual change. It can be a time where we both understand His grace and the Gospel in ways that are much deeper and more personal than maybe we did when we were younger.
To be continued ...
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