Understanding Regret

I have a friend I love to shop with.  This girl is a bit funky and spontaneous and whenever I’m with her it is guaranteed to be a good time.

As a shopper, one minute she’s thrifty, carefully minding a budget and the next minute she falls in love with the perfect mustard colored plaid vest (It exists. I promise. I saw it.) or a fabulous bedding set and she throws caution to the wind, buying it and the other half dozen things that catch her eye.  She’s a blast, I tell ya.

But the interesting thing about her is shortly after every shopping trip I’ve been on with her, she is ready to return about half of the stuff she bought.  Buyers remorse consumes her, every single time.  She analyzes what she bought, analyzes what she needs, analyzes how much she spent and then analyzes exactly which items should go back to the store.

I don’t have that issue.  I never want to return the things I bought.  In fact, the only shopping related remorse I ever seem to have is for the things I didn’t buy.  I have “I wish I would have bought it” remorse.  Seriously.

 

 

Sometime in my early 20’s I decided it was important to me to live a life with no regrets.  It became my internal motto, my barometer.

Having fun has always been high on my priority list. I want to actually burn all the candles I buy.  To the wick, burn ‘em.  I want the people I love to know it.  I want to use the good dishes.  On a Tuesday.  I want to say yes to my kids, yes to adventures, yes to brave.  That sort of thing.  No regrets.

And it seemed to be working for me, for the most part.

Having my first kid, didn’t seem to change my thoughts on this all that much.  I found our new baby to quite adaptable to my nature and ideals.  Babies are totable and newly crowned grandparents are always eager to babysit.  Kid one didn’t seem to slow me down all that much.

I read books to my freshly birthed offspring and championed homemade baby food.  I shunned giving my child refined sugar for as long as humanly possible and banned television as much as it was in my control. We taught him sign language and were certain our prodigy was going to be a boy genius.

And then we had another baby.  My idealistic standards of motherhood weren’t quite as easy to keep the second time around and this time we had a cranky baby.  Homemade baby food didn’t happen as frequently, sign language was minimal and television was harder to avoid.

You can imagine the shift that happened with the next two babies.  It’s a wonder the fourth child survived.  His first food may very well have been a cheeseburger form McDonald’s.  I’m sure I documented it in his baby book that I never made.

 

The other day I was reading about the world shortly before the flood and one verse, one sentence, jumped off the page.

Say what?  The Lord regretted something.  He regretted.  Really?

Apparently God didn’t have an internal motto like mine…..or maybe, my internal motto didn’t quite perfectly align with His.

It’s amazing to me how a verse like this can stop you in your tracks.  A verse you’ve read before, blown by and barely noticed and then one day just stops you in your tracks.  Maybe it’s because I was reading it in the NIV this time, when I’m primarily a New King James Version girl.  Or maybe it’s the words I needed to hear right then.  Either way, God’s Word is kind of awesome like that.

 

The idea of no regrets looks good on paper, friends, but it’s not realistic.  Not for God and certainly not for us.

Our lives, lived well, are impossibly intertwined with the lives of others.  Others who have baggage.  Much different, yet much the same, as our own.  Things don’t turn out like we thought they would, like we hoped they would, like we planned for them to.

The truth is we will have regrets.  We will regret harsh words to the spouse we love, impatience with the kids who have our heart, chocolate cake that makes our jeans snug and feeding our kids one too many Happy Meals.  We will regret stressing about Happy Meals more than happy hearts and adult children who choose to go a direction other than what we had hoped for, prayed for, planned for.

There are so many variables that make this life messy, friends.  Avoiding regret is impossible.  Let’s not put that much pressure on ourselves.  Instead let’s make a difference by the manner with which we deal with those regrets.

In Genesis, shortly after that verse that caught my attention, God preserved Noah and his family.  He performed a miracle and saved the one man, the one family that still honored Him. The human race was preserved by a God who chose grace in the midst of rampant evil.  He displayed miraculous love in the midst of what I can only imagine was heart-breaking regret.

May we see regret as nothing more than that.  An opportunity for unfettered grace, new life, new hope, miraculous love.  And never forget the power of His living and active word to transform our thoughts today and every day.