Day 3823 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hosea 6:1 NIV

The locust

We’re told in Joel of this invading horde that comes screaming into the existence of a people so far gone as to have lived in utter denial of God and thus doing all but absolutely nothing to honor Him, revere Him, respect Him. And it’s this army that seeks to devour and destroy the very lives of those to whom it’s been sent on what is clearly a mission to leave such a stark tragedy in its wake that those left behind will perhaps indeed finally awake unto the seeing, as if for once, the ways in which they’d been living their lives and how there was just no life lived within them.

And it’s most hopefully promised in Joel 2:25 that He will restore to those who do repent of such a lifeless life unto the living of a life that seeks finally to honor He who both gives and is the Life the years that the locust has eaten.

Yet then what if I’m the locust?

See, yesterday’s post left me thinking, as they often do, about the many things that I myself have perhaps stolen from myself or destroyed for myself. And while this is something that none can know for certain, the feeling of such uncertainty seems to show that there may well be something there that we have missed or messed up. After all, if we truly knew that all we’d ever sat out to do was as reasonable and right as we’ve long had in mind, what then of such things as regret?

I mean, if we’re as good at living this life as we’ve lived our lives as if be we might, then we shouldn’t have even the ability to recognize regret. It should be a perpetual non-starter as it should have no reason to be something of consideration as we should know full well that there’s just nowhere for that idea to go seeing as we’ve always known both what to do and that we’ve done it well.

And yet, well it does seem as if we all do know of such things as regret and the stinging misery that is guilt which either begets it or is rather built from it. The truth is that it doesn’t really matter whether the guilt or the regret came first as, kind of like with the chicken and egg thing, it’s really not worth the amount of time it would take for us to debate it as we should just be both thankful for the chicken and the eggs it lays and willing to admit we’re not thankful for the things we’ve done that have left both guilt and regret.

But, and only in humility, that we’re strangely willing to sit within them, to experience the miseries they are so as to find the reasons for those darker seasons in an effort given unto gleaning whatever we might take away into this new day in which we have the chance to perhaps not mess up quite so much.

Question is do we have the humility to embrace our mistakes and in turn the ability to from them learn? Or are we still stuck inside this fight to make our lives look still as perfect as our honesty knows they never can be?

And that because you cannot make perfect what has already been proven the opposite. For this is one of those things that is impossible with man as we’ve simply not the power to fix nor the willingness to even admit that we might kind of seriously maybe need that sort of thing. Forgiveness. And too then the mercy and grace which gives it. Which, again judging from how we’ve been convinced to live these lives, aren’t really things that we seem ready or willing to contemplate either.

Simply because the both exist only in this presence of them being undeserved. And that’s just a problem because we’re a people who lived based upon this idea of our being ever-deserving of basically everything we come to either think we want, know we need, know we want and only think we need. And indeed, for the vast majority of our lives we’ve each been vastly lost within some blending of the four. It’s only then that the batch we’ve built in the past we’ve broken has since gone sour and left us frantically seeking some way to distance ourselves from what we ourselves designed.

For that’s the sorrow of hindsight in that it helps us to see the life we alone decided to design in what’s only this great big mess we’ve left behind, often seen as so very big and burdensome that we simply throw up our hands, close our eyes, turn our heads and walk away.

But friends, if we don’t learn from the messes we’ve made as these potential locusts we’ve been that have indeed destroyed so many harvests of so many things for which we ourselves have hoped, and done so for years that we too thus devoured inside said destruction of every better we’ve never been, who’s to say then that we won’t do it all over again? Who are we to then pretend that we won’t make more of the same mistakes, even if in different ways, that only lead us right back to where we’ve all tried to deny we’ve been?

Who’s to say that we can live a better way when we’ve not the courage to consider our losses and how we’re the ones who chose to win them, to want them?

Yes, have you ever considered that heartbreaking fact? That we have literally been the very ones who wanted every wrong turn that we’ve taken and thus every mistake we’ve had to make in taking them?

Friends, if that’s not able to humble us then we’re in some serious trouble! Because let’s be honest for a second here, each of us are what are the barely walking, still smoking, somewhat even smoldering ruins of a past we’ve chosen in which so much went so wrong that we barely have the ability to talk about it. And while that’s not to say that we’ll not always readily regale anyone and everyone with every good thing we’ve done and all the fun we’ve had, truth is that none of us are ever quite so ready or willing to get into the same passionate recounting of all the mistakes we’ve made and the messes they became.

In fact, chances are we don’t even remember their half!

And why is that? Because rather than sitting with the understanding that we’re the ones who’ve chosen to mess so much up and in fact how we’d do it, we’ve again determined instead to simply ignore it, to deny it, to debate anyone anytime they dare bring it up. Indeed, some of our most staunch arguments have always been taken in that stance that there’s no chance that we were truly the ones who made the mistakes that our every past can prove we’ve made.

We even go so far into that fight that we live as if we’ve just gotten everything right!

But what then of all the things we don’t talk about? What of all the regrets we know we have? What of all the guilt we’ve most definitely felt? What of all the lies we’ve lived in a life we’ve lived as if we could do no wrong? What of all the rugs we have and the closets we carry? Aren’t we the least bit tired of all the sweeping and then standing in front of those many museums of our mistakes and miseries telling everyone always that there’s nothing inside to see?

Do this we truly believe?

That we really know nothing of guilt? That we’ve not done things we truly regret? That shame doesn’t know our name nor we its? Friends, come on now! There isn’t a single person alive who can say with any honesty at all that there aren’t things that they’ve done that they wish they hadn’t. For we’ve all said things that we hated the taste of. We’ve thought thoughts that we wish we could unthink. We’ve not thought about things that we wish we’d have thought about sooner.

See, making a mistake isn’t always even about doing something wrong. We can even feel regret over our not doing the right thing sooner.

Or at least I know I do.

Indeed, I’ve been writing these daily posts for over 10 years now, but I often wonder how much further I’d be and thus how much more of Him I’d know if I’d have started 5 years before that. I wish I would have started reading the Bible before I was in my twenties. I wish I’d have started working out and eating right before I weighed over 300 pounds. I wish I’d have stopped listening to certain music before I did. I wish I’d have stopped hanging around certain people before they drug me along into the doing of things I wish I could take back.

And we all have that same list, or at least a slightly tweaked and thus more personal version of it.

And yet, again, it’s only the things that we did do right that we perhaps only wish we’d have done right well before we did.

What then of the many more things that we’ve only done wrong in all those years that we ate seeking to glut ourselves upon the getting of our glory in this story we’ve each so selfishly tried writing as if we were living it rightly? Friends, what can we know of living life right if we’ve not any cognizance of getting things wrong? How do you measure what should be unless there’s the shouldn’t be against which or from which to measure it?

Don’t we get it?

And if we say we do, that we do understand that for there to be right there must too be wrong as much as light can only prove how bright it is by the presence of the dark that’s proven dark by the same, then how can any of us know any of the regret we’ve known? For indeed, to everything there is an opposite which exists to help us better understand the distance between these ever-diverging paths of a life paved in two ways toward one day. And that day is the Day of Judgement upon which our every single word, deed, thought, failure and foolishness will be, well, judged.

My question is why then not live practicing for what will in fact determine the outcome of our forever? Why not start judging what we’re doing now so as to determine, as best we can, what His determination might be? Why not hit a bended knee that finally meets a tongue trying to learn what it is to confess the mess we’ve made so as to learn the Name that came to save us from the same? Why not admit that we do have regrets and that no, that’s not how God created us to live.

For again, as we so often mention, He made us in His image. And friends, His image is one of holy perfection! In Him there is no sin, and yet despite our having fallen so far that we’ve all sinned and fallen short of His glory as seen inside what it is to be holy, we only wholly dismiss the very premise that suggests that we might have been wrong even just once.

And yet we know we have!

So what then are we running from?

And if we say we’re not running from something, well then friends, why does God still feel so often so far away?

He literally came in Christ to lay down His life to pour forth the Spirit to live so close that our hearts become His home. But again, let’s be honest with ourselves, the Holy Spirit has only ever been at best bunkmates with all the things we’ve not yet come to admit He shouldn’t have to share our hearts with. At least I know that’s the rooming situation I’ve seemingly forced Him into, or rather asked Him into and actually imagined He might be okay with.

For indeed, even still after all this reading and writing in regard to His Word, still I say and do things that I shouldn’t. Still I think thoughts that I wish I couldn’t. Still I don’t ask the questions I know I should. Still I know the good I should do but somehow manage to find a way or reason to leave it undone while I do instead the very things that I still come to regret.

And yes, there are those who say that those in Christ shouldn’t really have any regrets. And I agree. For such is the purpose of His washing us clean and making our scarlet into snow. It’s proven in how in Him our pasts have to go as we get to go toward where He is from where we’ve been. But friends, in order to make that trip we have to first admit where we’ve been and meet there the honesty that says that we honestly don’t like it.

We have to have regrets if we’re to ever know what it’s like to not have regrets.

And so, do I have regret? Well, though perhaps not what a Christian should say, you bet I do. And I’m glad I do. In fact I truly appreciate every single regret I still have of even mistakes I made decades ago. And while I truly hope they do eventually fade, I also hope they don’t until I’ve gotten every lesson I need to learn from them. Why? Because so long as I know of them and thus feel their sting I know I’ll meet them with such a heartbreak that I’m compelled to fight against them.

Not that I can change them as life doesn’t work like that.

No, but because I believe that His tearing us apart with such things as guilt and the ravages of regret are meant to help us come to see that with Him we can learn to do something about them never repeating. That we can do something that takes a stand against our doing something similar to the stupid thing we did back then that led to our having a regret now. We can do something differently, but only if we can be helped to see, be it through sorrow or shame, the many things we’ve already done that we only regret having done already.

Indeed, if we regret something then we’ll likely try quite hard to not be found doing something else that will end in the same feeling. And so I appreciate the regrets that I have. Don’t enjoy them. But, well, maybe you don’t always have to enjoy something to appreciate it.

In fact, maybe what we should appreciate most is that which we don’t enjoy as such is what offers us the clearest glimpse into the life we don’t want to live.

And seeing even a single scene of that life we don’t want to know is what just might give us the willingness to fight a little harder to aim a little higher so that even if we miss we still manage to make it to something better than what would have been in what we never then have to remember as a could have been that is only the result of something our ego or arrogance or ignorance managed to devour and destroy.

Indeed, I’m tired of those in my life, those years that I only find afterward were destroyed by decisions that I thought I was smart enough to make, and I regret just how many of them I’ve known in my life. But those regrets as met in the many things that could have been, well, I find they’re what now inspire me most to fight harder than I ever did to find that better life I never found in that one I found that only found regret.

So yeah, I have my regrets, my guilts, my shames and sorrows and a million sorrys that I’ve not said in the wake of mistakes I’ve not realized that I’ve made quite yet. I only hope He helps me see more of what all I’ve gotten and still get wrong, even be it through the tearing of truth through the lies I’ve lived through. Because that’s literally the only way to fix something. We have to see first that it’s broken. And well, I can’t think of much that’s better at helping us see that than regret can.

And yet isn’t it ironic that this world tells us that it’s best to just let things go? Friends, letting something go means our staying put in the very place from which we then propel said something else to leave. But our moving on, as is done through the inspiration of regret which inspires us to move beyond the doing of the things that cause it, well that leads us to be the ones that move, that change, that try for once.

But again, how can we know what to do, what to try, what to change if the worst we ever experience is just letting something go? Indeed, what if what we let go could have been what was meant to move us forward? I don’t know, but I just see more reason in holding on to what can inspire me to be better than just letting go of whatever I’ve done that can’t then help me anymore. For anything we let go loses all presence and importance in life.

And perhaps there’s some benefit in that, in some cases.

But friends, we need to make sure that we’ve squeezed every drop of our being improved from everything we’ve been through before we just throw it away. For there’s always something to learn. And it just seems that regret really helps us do so in ways that not much else can.

And so yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have regret and hopefully there will come that time in which we don’t. But until then I’m quite convinced that He gave us the ability to feel its sting for a reason. And seeing as how His will and all the ways in which it works work for the good of those who love Him and are living as if they have been called into and thus unto His purpose, then perhaps even regret is a good thing that’s working for our good.

After all, we’d not be able to feel that bad about something if not for the presence of something better asking us why we settled so short.

Indeed, I believe that regret begets repentance as it inspires in us that movement from who we’ve been aimed where we’ve gone back to who He is and thus who and where we were made to be.

So welcome His tearing, His wounding, His opening your eyes unto the seeing of the mistakes you made in your life. For He doesn’t do it to hold it against us but to help us see that it’s all only held us from Him.

And friends, that’s a very good thing for us to learn!

No matter how we learn it nor the role we may learn we’ve played in what is in every way a story of salvation from shame.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold