“Regret”

 

A wise man once said, "The Lord put eyes in the front of our head so that we can look forward, not behind us.”  Now the prospect of regret can encourage us to not put ourselves in a position to experience regret, but it can also impede progress if we focus on our past once we have repented.  Once we have asked forgiveness, we must forgive ourselves and move forward. We can no longer control what happened in the past, and dwelling on something that we cannot control drains us of energy which we can use on being productive. Kevin Elko calls these thoughts "sucker thoughts". They operate much like those sucker branches on fruit trees that do not produce fruit, but utilize the nutrients from the trunk.  With these thoughts in mind, we can all decide at this moment that we will work to never experience regret again.  Stephen Covey poses this question.  "What is the one thing that you know that if you did it superbly well and consistently well would have significant results in your life"?  Then he asks, "If you are not doing them right now, Why Not?" He goes on and answers the question by saying that the reason we do them is because we do not consider them with any sense of urgency.  Often in my life, I wind up doing the "urgent' before the important.  C.S. Lewis is quoted on his death bed as saying, "I have done all that I was sent into this world to do, I am ready to go". Wow, this should be the goal of each one of us.  George Washington Carver says that "NO individual has any right to come into the world and go out without leaving behind distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it".   I can’t help but think of the hymn we use to sing a lot with the line that says, " o how sad to face the Judgement, unprepared to meet thy God". While we can have many different types of regret in this life, the saddest and most tragic regret we can have is if we chose not to obey the commandments of God.