“Give no thought to the things of the past . . .” The Prophet Isaiah

“Stop looking in the rearview mirror of life and keep your eyes on the path before you.”  Me

There is a great line at the end of the movie “Wild” which is a depiction of the life journey of Cheryl Strayed and her epic hike along the Pacific Coast Trail.  She is standing on The Bride of The Gods, reflecting not only upon her life journey to that point, much of it a path of pain inflicted upon her not only by others, but by herself.  She says, “I am grateful for everything I experienced, for it brought me to this moment.”  Her regrets had been redeemed.

Do you ever have regrets?  Of course you do!  So do I!  It’s so easy to regret the decisions made in life.  “Hindsight is 20/20.”  Have you heard that cliché?  It means that looking back on our past we can see things perfectly, or believe we can. It is a temptation to get stuck in the whirlpool of the “woulda, shoulda, coulda’s” and be sucked under into an emotional abyss wishing that we had made a different decision or taken a different path.  And when we do, we tend to berate and beat up on ourselves.   

The greatest commandment that Jesus gave was “LoveGod and love your neighbor as yourself.”  Immediately I think of all the “neighbors”, be they near or far, that I have failed to love well, or love at all.  But I ignore the simple truth that I have left myself out of that equation.  What about you?  Do you find it difficult to love yourself?  Not just the person you are now, but the person you were “back then”, warts and all.

In my experience working with other people, I have found that much of what causes a great deal of current emotional and spiritual pain is the result of past hurts.  Not only the hurts imposed by others, but the ones the person brought upon themselves, whether deliberately or accidentally, consciously or subconsciously.  “Why did I have that first drink?  Why did I marry that person?  Why didn’t I pursue a different career?  Why did I allow that other person to treat me that way?”  On and on and on it goes.  It is a not-so-subtle form of self-flagellation that causes us to carry that pain of regrets into the present, and even impart them on others. 

Loving yourself well means loving not only the person you are now, but the person you were in the past, bad decisions and all. But peering at the person we were in our past as “bad” or “good” is not only not beneficial, but extremely inaccurate.  For you see we are viewing ourselves from our own perspective, not the perspective of God.  God’s love for us is not dependent in any way, shape, or form on the behaviors we exhibited, the choices we made, or the struggles we went through. In fact, those very elements of our life experience may make God love us even more!  “It is not the healthy who need physician”, Jesus said, “but the sick.”  It is in our life sicknesses, our desperate situations, and our so-called bad decision making that God loves us most! I write this not as a pious platitude but from personal experience.  It is SO easy for me to look in the rearview mirror of my life with regrets and remorse, but it does ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD.  What matters is where we are now.  The present.  This moment. This is what matters. This is where we live.  This is where we meet God.  And this is where we find mercy, grace, and forgiveness, that redeems the past and allows us to live in the fullness of God’s love.  A love that we find within the very self we find so hard to love.

“You are love in everything that is and belong to the perfection of your greatness that not even my nothingness is far from You, for You meet me in my imperfection and You act on me not from the distance of my failings, but from the presence of Your perfection which is the way love is.” [1]

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[1] Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows, editors.