Regrets are brutal. They remind you often of that boneheaded thing you did three decades ago, or that opportunity you missed, or that person you didn’t mean to offend but who will probably never speak to you again. They beat you up for all the imperfections in your life. And they stick with you for a very long time.
Because of our regrets, many of us live with an unfulfilled desire to separate ourselves from our past—to scrap our mistakes as though they had never happened and to start fresh. The good news is that we can—perhaps not in the eyes of our friends, and even less so in the eyes of our enemies, but in our own eyes and in the eyes of God. He promises to consider our past no more, especially those failures and mistakes we’ve made, and to separate them from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). He really steps into today and says, “Okay, let’s start here.”
When we live with that newness, not only do our perceptions about ourselves change. Eventually even the perceptions of those around us will change too. Sure, we can always count on an occasional annoying voice to remind us of our mistakes, but it is speaking of another life in another time. Those close to us will perceive the newness and treat us accordingly. Life will begin to change. And regrets will forever fade away.
