Don’t Waste Time Looking Back

If you could go back in time to a piv­otal point in your young life and give your­self one word/sentence of advice, and know that you would accept the advice, what would it be?

Like most peo­ple, there are a num­ber of moments that, if I could, I would go back and relive, apply­ing the knowl­edge I have today to sit­u­a­tions that occurred ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago.

One of those moments would be a chilly win­ter evening when I was a mere 19 years old.

It took me many years to real­ize, ana­lyze, and, even­tu­ally, appre­ci­ate the import of a deci­sion I made that night. Frankly, it did not seem mon­u­men­tal at the time because, like a typ­i­cal 19-year-old, I lacked the capac­ity to grasp the seri­ous­ness of the moment. I could not have fore­seen that so many years later, I would be able to look back and see pre­cisely how my one-word response to a ques­tion lit­er­ally charted the course of my life.

The ques­tion, the per­son who asked it, the cir­cum­stances, and the events that unfolded after­ward are not ger­mane to the real issue. Yes, I would look back at my naïve, inex­pe­ri­enced, 19-year-old self and advise myself to respond differently.

“Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only for wal­low­ing in.” (Kather­ine Mansfield)

“Regret” is defined as “a feel­ing of dis­ap­point­ment or dis­tress about some­thing that one wishes could be dif­fer­ent.” Do I regret the deci­sion I made on that night so many years ago? From time to time, when some­thing reminds me of that sit­u­a­tion, I do. But it is a brief, fleet­ing emo­tion born out of curios­ity about how dif­fer­ent my life would be today. I don’t wal­low in remorse because that would be a futile waste of energy. I don’t believe in look­ing back too often or for too long because it is not a pro­duc­tive use of a very pre­cious and scarce com­mod­ity: My time.

But I do believe that it is the human con­di­tion to won­der from time to time whether, had I cho­sen dif­fer­ently, I would be liv­ing as I am now — in the same loca­tion, with the same level of com­fort, engaged in the same activ­i­ties. Would I have enjoyed a suc­cess­ful career? Would I have had chil­dren and, if so, what would they be like? Would I still be involved in orga­nized reli­gion today? If so, what religion/church? Most impor­tantly, would I be happy?

I believe in some­thing I do not under­stand: Pre­des­ti­na­tion. The Divine is the alpha and omega, the begin­ning and the end, an eter­nal, unchang­ing force. So the Divine both knows our past and sees our future, yet we have been given free will. I believe that I truly made a choice on that night so many years ago, but I did so based upon the lim­ited infor­ma­tion that was avail­able to me then. I did so with the lim­ited ben­e­fit of only hav­ing lived 19 years, equipped with the minus­cule amount of knowl­edge I had amassed up to that time about the real­i­ties of life: The unde­ni­able power of free will and its consequences.

I believe that I made the deci­sion I was pre­des­tined to make as best as I am able to con­cep­tu­al­ize and under­stand that term. I made the deci­sion that the Spirit led me to make because there were pre­cise things I was meant to do, peo­ple I was meant to inter­act with, places I was meant to be at par­tic­u­lar times in order for spe­cific oppor­tu­ni­ties to come my way. I made the best deci­sion I could at that time, in that place, in con­sid­er­a­tion of the infor­ma­tion then avail­able to me. And so, ulti­mately, I made the right decision.

For me, peace about this chap­ter of my life, like so many oth­ers, is found in the words of Paul:

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gur­gled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squint­ing in a fog, peer­ing through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, know­ing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that com­plete­ness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that con­sum­ma­tion: Trust steadily in God, hope unswerv­ingly, love extrav­a­gantly. And the best of the three is love.”

1 Corinthi­ans 13:11–13
The Message

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