Life’s abundance acquired through accepting regret

Conclusion is not always about closure. Nor is peace always a natural consequence of leaving well enough alone.

At the end of a year, at the commencement of a new year, there is an incredible drive to reflect. If we don’t and we need to we deny the one thing, the truth, that could set us free.

At this time of year, as I reflect, one of the questions I ask myself is, do I have any regrets?

Not spending every spare second with my young son when I’ve been drawn to write. That’s one. I often wonder if writing is worth it; what it costs me. But it’s a bit of an obsession. I’m given so many ideas to write on. There are other regrets I have, but these are things I would have done differently over the past five years, like interactions and relationships I could’ve done better, not so much this year. Then there is the macro-regret of losing family I dearly did not want to lose that is my refrain of regret that plunges me into the space that Thoreau speaks of.

So much regret from so much grief. And yet, the paradox adorns wonder upon the soul.

There is an opportunity in regret that far too many of us evade because we’re worried it will cost us too much emotionally. We fear it will make us vulnerable. We suspect it will be a waste of time and send us down a sinkhole of depression we may not be able to get out of.

So, to entertain what is spoken of here is a risk. I get that. Yet, there are some that cannot but help go into regret simply because they cannot escape it. It cannot be denied because it cannot be avoided. If that is you, instead of lamenting that which you cannot escape from, avoid or deny, thank God that there is a kingdom compensation for you that most people never get to touch.

Heaven only touches us when, by grief of loss or regret, we touch it.

Heaven steps down from lofty mountain grandeur
to visit upon the broken. And those
blissfully unaware of such pain
never encounter the depth of blessing in it.

Jesus said that the truth will set us free and that he came to give us life and the capacity to live it abundantly. We probably never counted on the idea that Jesus could redeem our regrets and make them the actual reason we experience more of him. But that is, in actual fact, the spiritual reality.

What I continually write about is this fact of spirituality: out of the brokenness of ashes we may rise as a phoenix, interred as it were, not for death but for life.

We may find that we only experience resurrection having gone to our figurative cross.