Goodbye, Regret!

For a long time, I really disliked my life. My parents separated when I was seven or eight, finally got divorced when I was fourteen, and we were often neglected on visitation with our father. He fought hard with our mother over child support, alimony, and a settlement, and she gave in time and again in an effort to gain us more rights on visitation, which he then consistently ignored. The end result is that we were poor, deeply in debt, and the stress the divorce put our mother through has led to a string of medical conditions, severe enough that she is disabled from working. Our financial situation meant I couldn't go to the college of my choice and had to settle for a different one.

It was there that I met a friend who got me the job out here that has allowed me to get my mother nearly debt-free, support her when she became disabled, and pursue my dream of writing. I could not understand as I was going through all of this what God's purpose for it was. Now that I am here, I can see that His purpose, at least in part, seems to have been to bring me to this point.

It is not easy to stop wondering what would have happened if only... Maybe I'd be a multi-millionaire by now, maybe I'd be married and have two kids, maybe I'd have fallen into sin and messed up my life pretty badly. I might have even been killed in a car crash or something. The point is that I wouldn't be here and that here is where I am supposed to be. As I slowly realize this in my heart and not merely my head, my frustrations with how my life has gone have started to melt away, taking with them the anger I've harbored over the years.

As usual, my point is not simply to relay what is happening in my life. It's to encourage everyone who has had situations that have happened to them that they don't understand to realize that God has a plan. It may be leading to something years into the future that you couldn't possibly guess at, but there is a plan, and it is good. Realizing this won't end all the pain you might be going through and it might not be enough to even make you smile, but a true realization of this can bring peace to your hearts.

And so I am bidding goodbye to all those regrets, slowly but surely, that have come from things that have happened to me, rather than that have been done by me. For the latter, I continue to regret some of the things I've done, not so much for the consequences as for that I was weak and stupid at the time I did them. I have realized, of course, that I can't take them back and have only a limited ability to rectify them, and so it is only sensible to attempt to learn what lesson there is to be found in making them. I don't believe in most cases that the lesson has been worth making the mistake, particularly when talking about sin, which in my case is usually saying things in anger I shouldn't, because it would have been better to have been strong enough to have not committed the sin than to have committed it and learned a lesson.

But I believe also that there is a difference between wishing you hadn't done something and not forgiving yourself for it. It is good to wish I had not done wrong; if I were to give that up, it would be in my mind a validation of wrongdoing. It is good to forgive myself, too, because I have already been forgiven by the One whose opinion actually matters.

And by knowing that nothing I have done has taken me out of God's will for my life and that all that has happened to me from the outside has brought me where I am meant to be, I can rest knowing that my God is greater than my stupidity (which can be pretty awesome at times), greater than my selfishness (which can be even more awesome), greater than all that life has thrown my way, and greater than anything I will ever endure.

There may be things in our lives right now that are happening to us as the result of our bad decisions. There may be tragedies and trials we don't deserve. We are outside the perfect will of God because we have all fallen short. But we are also all within His permissible will; nothing that has ever happened to you has befallen you without God allowing it. I used to be furious with God for that, because He allowed bad things to happen. Now, that same thought brings peace, because I know that if God allowed it, He will give me strength to endure it and bring me toward a better future with Him.