I have regrets. Many of them. Too many to name.
Some are things I did. Others are things I didn’t do. Looking back, I wish I had taken formal education and career development more seriously earlier in life. I wish I had been more intentional about career planning and building lasting professional relationships. I wish I had developed greater self-discipline in certain areas. And I certainly wish I had established better habits around healthy eating and exercise much earlier.
Some regrets are larger than others. But live long enough and most of us accumulate a collection. The question eventually becomes: what do we do with the road already traveled? We can’t go back and drive it again.
Experience gives us better vision, looking backward
One of the frustrating things about experience is that much of it arrives after we needed it. At twenty-five we don’t have the perspective of sixty-five. We make decisions with the maturity, information, priorities, fears, ambitions, and understanding we possess at the time. Years later we look backward with considerably better vision, and of course we can see things we would do differently.
That doesn’t mean we excuse every poor decision by saying, “I didn’t know any better.” Sometimes we did know better and did it anyway. That’s part of the human story too.
I’ve made mistakes that ignorance can’t explain. I’ve lacked discipline when I knew discipline was needed. I’ve pursued things that ultimately weren’t nearly as important as I thought they were. I’ve occasionally learned the hard way that life can be uncertain, shallow, materialistic, and fickle. And I’ve learned that I can be those things too.
That last realization matters.
Self-observation changes how we see others
It is relatively easy to observe the shortcomings of other people. We’re remarkably good at it. Someone makes a bad decision and we wonder how they could have been so foolish. Someone behaves selfishly and we’re disappointed. Someone fails to live according to values they claim to believe. Someone lets us down.
With enough life behind me, I find myself a little less surprised by those things. Not because I’ve decided they don’t matter, and not because acceptance means condoning harmful behavior. It doesn’t. I’ve simply spent enough time observing myself.
Christianity teaches that humanity is fallen. That’s an easy theological concept to discuss in the abstract. It’s considerably more personal when I recognize that I’m included. The fallen nature I see in the world isn’t merely something wrong with everybody else — I see evidence of it in my own history.
And strangely enough, that realization hasn’t made me more cynical about people. It has made me more understanding.
Grace changes the standard
My faith doesn’t tell me that my mistakes don’t matter. It tells me that they aren’t the end of the story.
God’s love and forgiveness have taught me something about grace that I don’t think I understood as deeply when I was younger. Grace doesn’t pretend wrong is right. It doesn’t remove consequences. It doesn’t require us to call destructive behavior acceptable.
Grace simply refuses to define a person entirely by the worst thing they’ve done.
I’m profoundly thankful God doesn’t define me that way. And that creates an uncomfortable obligation. If I am grateful for God’s patience with me, His forgiveness of me, and His willingness to continue working in me despite all the evidence that the job isn’t finished, then what should that change about the way I treat somebody else?
I am called to emulate God’s nature, not man’s fallen nature. That means when I’m tempted toward judgment, resentment, retaliation, pride, or self-righteousness, I have another model. Not an easy one. A better one.
Never visit the past alone
Cathy once shared something with me that she had heard Bill Johnson teach. Neither of us remembers his exact words, but the thought she carried away from it was essentially this: never visit the past without the Holy Spirit.
That thought has stayed with me. There are places in our past where we aren’t particularly good guides for ourselves. Left alone, we may condemn ourselves for what God has forgiven. We may excuse something He wants us to learn from. Or we may simply reopen an old wound without allowing anything useful to come from it.
If I’m going to look backward, I want God involved in the looking. Show me what I need to learn. Show me what I need to own. Show me what I need to forgive. And show me what I finally need to leave behind.
Regret can still teach us
I don’t believe we need to romanticize regret. Given the opportunity, there are things I would change. Lessons are valuable, but some lessons are unnecessarily expensive.
Still, if I cannot change what happened, I can decide what I will allow it to teach me. My failures have taught me humility. My lack of discipline in some seasons has taught me the value of discipline now. Missed opportunities have taught me to recognize opportunities differently. Relationships I failed to develop have taught me to value relationships more intentionally. And my own need for forgiveness has made it much harder to believe that grace is something primarily intended for other people to practice.
Perhaps that’s one of the ways God redeems the road behind us. He doesn’t always remove the consequences. He can change what they produce in us.
The road ahead
There is a danger in spending too much time looking backward. Regret can become another form of self-absorption. Eventually we have to turn around.
The road behind us matters because it brought us here. But the road ahead is where we still have choices. I can’t establish better habits thirty years ago; I can establish better habits today. I can’t build a relationship I neglected decades ago in exactly the way I could have then; I can become more intentional about relationships now. I can’t undo every failure; I can learn from it. And I can’t ask God to give me grace while refusing to extend grace to the imperfect people traveling beside me.
I have regrets. I expect I always will. But I don’t have to spend the rest of my life living inside them.
There is grace for the road already traveled. And, thankfully, there is still road ahead.