Day 4090 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 38:4 NIV

What is regret?

Is it a guilt so great that nothing else really even seems good anymore? Is it a misery met inside every time we make a mistake? Is it the feeling found in finding out you’ve once again failed to find what you’d hoped the future would hold? Is it realizing the past was proven the disaster it was because you’d become unable to care as to the responsibility proven in between right and wrong? Is it always a long-gone journey spent holding hands with sorrow seen inside every scene we’ve shown of a life lived on loan but always loaned out to another, letting someone else tell us who to be, what to do, where to stay?

Is it a failure to move beyond where we’ve been, who we’ve become and what all we’ve done to define the both?

Is it something fear knows to find better than we could have ever imagined it might?

All’s I know is that within this life all of us have in fact felt this fight that’s been so often waged between where we’d hoped to go and wherever it was that we ended up instead. And it’s been this war it’s been because we’ve all of us lived taking both choices for granted and leaving personal responsibility the victim of our choice to not care quite as much as history either already has or will someday soon come to prove that we perhaps should have.

All because we’ve not had any real way, or so it seems we still assume, to determine the difference between what we should do and what more we shouldn’t try.

In truth we have as we’ve each been born of those first of us who passed down unto us their failure found in their finding it an uncancerous thing to do as God had asked them not to. Indeed, ‘twas because of that fruit taken from that tree that even now the eyes, hearts, ears and minds of still you and me have all been opened unto our too coming to see the difference, the distance, the dire discrepancy designed, demanded between those thing that are good and the, for now, seemingly more that are increasingly evil.

Increasing because, well, such is what all such gluttony does.

And make no mistake, making mistakes is an altogether gluttonous thing to do as it’s in truth something that not only have all of us chosen to do but in fact one that all of us have chosen to do vastly more often than we’ve chosen not to.

It’s almost as if we like getting things wrong.

And maybe we do.

But looking around at the state of the world we’re in, and to make it entirely more personal as that’s what this journey needs to be seeing as you and me we’re both involved, the shape we’re in ourselves, it’s pretty hard to sell the lie that we honestly like this life for what we’ve done to it. I mean, not to sound ungrateful but there’s an awful lot of great confusions, delusions, destructions taking place and thus taking us places we’d likely not choose to venture toward on our own.

Had we not, again, spent our lives giving them on loan to whatever it was that even pretended to offer us something we wanted with the plausible chance of avoiding whatever cost or consequence we too wanted to miss along the way.

This is the danger in all manner of selfishness.

It’s that it achieves in us something of this blindness that we all but seek actively as it allows for us to live as if we can’t see the danger we’re designing inside ourselves due to our putting ourselves first and actually thinking that such things as pleasure are better than pain.

Granted, sure does feel that way.

But if it were that way then you’d think, having each of us felt in fact so very much pleasure, that our lives would then seem far happier.

Seriously, if our feeling good were always the goal we’ve long lived as if it were, well then why’s everyone so miserable? Why do so many have so many regrets? Why is shame, sorrow, sadness even a thing? How is it that we know anything of guilt in what have been lives in which we’ve all seemingly thought that doing whatever we wanted, whatever made us feel good, look good, sounds good, smell good even was the very pinnacle of a life’s expectation?

Indeed, how is it that we can so often end up feeling bad about our doing what started out helping us feel good?

Is that not what regret is?

Is it not this somehow surprising meeting scheduled between us and misery, one we definitely didn’t schedule as we’re rather disinterested in misery and that because we’re altogether indifferent toward most things? Is it not this feeling we find as if out of nowhere that takes us always unaware of it being there in that place we’d gone to find the prize we had? Is it not our feeling bad about our doing something that we’d chosen to do because, as with everything else we’ve ever done in life, we thought that doing it, saying it, thinking it, having it would make our lives themselves feel, look, sound, seem better to whomever it was that was looking?

Haven’t we always been the ones who’ve been looking always to make our lives look, sound, seem like the very sum of all the fun and fame and fortune we wanted them to find, have, hold, be?

How then is it that we know anything of guilt or its closest of all cousins regret?

For do not we and guilt have had to met it we’re to know anything that is the further regret? Because guilt, as is being discussed here, it’s this feeling or our knowing that we’ve done something other than that which we should have done. It’s being found finding out that we’d made a choice that wasn’t the right one to make. It’s our making our bed wherever it’s been that we’ve decided to put our head.

Regret is the sleeping therein, or more often than not, the lack of any such ability to get much sleep as instead we lay awake with this feeling of such deep shame and remorse and sadness, and sorrow of course, that we can’t even seem to feel worthy of shutting our eyes as rather we need them to find some way to get us out of this mess, this misery, this mundane monotony of misunderstanding having stood us wherever it is that we’ve instead only ended up falling.

Falling for what turns out to be a lie, or group/path thereof, which has/have caused our lives to be elsewise lived in what’s become a depth of shame that is anything but everything anyone would ever hope to find.

And indeed, I myself have believed more than plenty of those lies throughout my life. Lies about how I needed to be, say, do something in particular in order to measure up to what someone particular wanted me to be, say, do. Or how life was supposed to prove a matter in which we’re meant to have all we hope to, not one in which we have to lose all we’ve had. Or that one that had me convinced for decades, literally all of my adult life, sixth grade on up, that love was something proven in lust rather than trust and thus too something found as easily as seeking out some seedy website upon which no wasn’t an answer the girls ever gave and we didn’t even have to get up the courage to ask.

No, it was just pictures to look at that brought such this rush to a life being lived in unnoticed ruin that the one living it could go on ruining it and never know they were doing it.

Until you look up one day and realize you’re 38 and all alone, left standing in a sea of shame over all the things you’ve seen mixed with all you know you haven’t as were found down that path you didn’t travel.

Yeah, I have my regrets. Things I’ve done that I now wish I’d never met the audacity to do. Choices I’ve chosen that I would give anything to go back and undo, rechoose, decide differently. A life I’ve lived in which I loved death so much that I one day did look up and realize that I was getting older and that my life had gotten so much colder, darker, heavier, more heartbreaking than I’d ever lived thinking it would.

Because all along it felt good. I did my best to make sure it looked good. I’ve always tried to sound good, seem good, be good.

Seems now that the main problem was, and there were many others to pick from, but it seems as though the main one was that I was always using some human version of what ‘good’ was supposed to be to help me determine just how good my life was. Mostly only my own as, again, we’ve become so entirely selfish that we daily settle for doing those things that make us feel good.

Moving then line as much as we need to and whenever we might so as to always ensure that our desires are met.

Thankfully God let my life get so out of line that I did one day find that I was filled with more regret than any amount of pleasure could or would ever be able to outrun or overrule.

And in fact it seems now that regret is one of my very best friends. Now that could be because I haven’t really any others as it seems this life narrows in ways we’d never imagine once you fathom the fullness of Heaven and agree there to leave everything here so that the needle’s eye seems a bit more manageable. But I think it’s also because I’ve become so determined to see how much better of a person that I can still be that I want to see all the ways in which I fail, all the times that I fall short, all the choices I’ve made that have made my life fall apart.

So that I can learn better how to hold it together.

Not that it’s on me to do so. But because I’ve spent so many years not doing so that, at this point, I’m just curious as to what it might be like if I did try.

What if I did refuse myself from time to time? What if I did deny my desires their desire to start more fires that only burn my betters to the eventual regrets that I’d find were they left holding the match? What if I did try a little harder to try and finally catch up with who God is, what He’s done, what He asks me to do in light of it all?

What if I tried to live my life as if a light instead of settling to remain a loser who knows so much regret thanks to his thinking that winning was something measured in pleasure and power and popularity?

What if I could learn finally to just stop doing those things that hold only a surface hope and sought instead those decidedly deeper?

Seems to me that perhaps life wouldn’t then feel this undeniably cheaper version that I’ve been known to live. And indeed, I think this is what makes regret so miserable. It’s that it’s a story told in just how little value we’ve considered life to hold. And that’s a fact seen inside everything we’ve ever done in which the choice we chose was only chosen because it seemed the easiest, the safest, the most fun to choose.

Which, sadly, seems to pretty much define just about every choice we have chosen.

Because we’re a people absolutely frozen to this faith placed in finding our purpose, our pleasure, our treasures and triumphs in this place in which we are right now. This hope of our living our best lives inside these lives we’re living has long required us to do within them, want within them only those things which were easy enough that we could do them, so assured that we knew we could find them, so basic and boring that we knew without question that we’d not fail them.

Nor they fail us.

Until they did!

Friends, that’s where regret lives!

It’s in that place in which we see glimpse of our face and realize it’s nothing but some foolish stranger staring back. Because no, I didn’t want to look like that, live like that, sound like that, say stuff like that. Indeed, I’m to the point in this journey spent seeking better wherever I can still maybe find it that I even regret words! Letters spoken in tandem cause me to lose sleep sometimes!

And what’s strange is that I love that life spent judging myself so harshly that those who know me tell me all the time that I’m my own worst enemy.

You dang straight I am!!

Why?

Because I’ve lived that life in which I was my very best friend. That life spent seeking to ensure I was always pleased, successful, having fun, feeling good.

I lived the wheels off that life!

And yet all the fun I had, all those friends I made, all those prizes I found and all the glory they gained, it all faded away so stinking fast that I couldn’t make sense of it. It’s like it all vanished in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, in literally a single moment’s time.

And when it did it left me standing there entirely aware of all I’d done to have all I’d had that I suddenly didn’t have anymore.

The fun was gone. The friends nowhere to be found. The pleasure tarnished and the treasure stained in a shade of red that told me I was dead thanks to how I’d lived my life.

I regret so many things!

Because I know they kept me from the things that I maybe wouldn’t have come to regret so much. They prevented me from proving my dreams not quite so impossible as my mistakes have proven they were. They ended my ability to dream for what was probably 20 years or more.

A chance I’m finally finding the courage to try again.

Why?

Because I don’t want to let the regret win more than it already has. I don’t want to one day up ahead have to look back again and wonder what could have been had I been a bit more willing to risk something, to say something, to be something.

No, I want to know that life in which we don’t even want to look back because we know that even better is ever before us.

Because friends, regret is nothing we should ever want to relive as it’s made in choices that we shouldn’t want to live for the first time. Regret empties our lives. It hollows out our hopes. It crushes our very bones as it is indeed a burden entirely too heavy to bear.

Why?

Because it’s one born in a life spent learning to not care. To just do whatever we want as if nothing bad can ever come of it. To say things without thinking them through, or to not say those things we’ll one day wish we’d have said instead. To try everything we can to try nothing at all of all the better things that we were created to be and called now to try and become.

That’s what sucks most about such miseries as guilt and regret. It’s realizing that the choices we’ve made weren’t the best choices to make, and, even more alarmingly, that the voices we’d listened to which encouraged, inspired us to make them were just liars looking to make us look like fools who cared for nothing more than our feeling good for a moment or two.

I’m done living this life listening to lies telling me that all that matters is how I feel.

Because, to be honest, I’ve felt enough regret to know it’s just not worth feeling the temporary highs sold by those lies.

The lows last far longer my friends!

Some of them an entire lifetime even.

Why settle for that? Why continue ahead doing things as if we’ll never regret them? Why make decisions so very lightly as to base them upon such things as the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. I’ll tell you plain, I wish that I’d have chosen the pain far more than I enjoyed the pleasure.

Why is that?

Because at least pain’s trying to teach us something.

Pleasure just distracts us from what pain can teach.

And to that I can no longer agree to agree. And that’s because I’ve finally come to learn the difference, even if just the outermost foggy version of it, between what I want and what I need. Because yeah, we all want to feel good. We all want to have friends. We all want to be loved and to feel as if we belong. But folks, finding those things in this place brings with it the express risk of our seeking for the versions we need.

This world sells cheap and easy versions of everything. And yes, they always look interesting and inviting and so safe and assured that we feel it almost our duty to go after them.

But looks are most certainly deceiving, and, well, so too does the heart remain deceptive above all things.

And this proven in all those times in which we’ve met with regret in life.

It was all made into the misery it’s become thanks to our hearts being so willing to be lied to, and our foolishness and selfishness always wanting to believe the lies.

Friends, doing things we regret is no way to live this life. It is the way we’ve lived this life. But that’s why He calls us to take up our crosses and follow for once the path He’s carved for us with that cross He carried. It’s to help us kill off those wayward desires we’ve allowed to exist within us so that they can’t lead us to so much guilt and regret in those days still ahead.

Because one day we’re all going to be wherever it is that this road ends. Now we can show up to that day carrying with us everything we’ve tried for in life, even the regrets that come along with it. Or we can get there so emptied out of everything here that we even left our regrets along the way and didn’t manage to find all that many on our way out thanks to our having chosen to look outside this world and our wants for what it was that we knew we needed instead.

Choice is ours.

Please don’t make it another you’ll regret.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold