p. 13 | On Regretting Our Mistakes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 10, 1914

On Regretting Our Mistakes

Probably the one thing that does the most to make men and women grow old and to wear out the springs of energy is the habit of turning over in mind what might have been. We brood over past mistakes and see how at some turning point we made a wrong choice, and then harass ourselves unceasingly by imagining what we should have gained if we had taken the other path. Somehow we cannot get the bright alternative out of mind, and its very brightness makes the conditions in which we live abnormally dark. Sometimes we doubt whether forebodings as to what may come do more to cloud and depress sensitive spirits than regrets for what might have been. But this is a case in which philosophy and faith should be permitted to have their say. Suppose you had made a better choice at that crisis; there is no certainty that you would have continued to make wise choices to the end of the chapter, and subsequent mistakes might have been as ruinous as the one you now deplore.

Furthermore, no amount of regret is going to bring back the lost opportunity. You have to take things as they are, and the very weakening of your powers through vain regrets will certainly prevent your making the best uses of your present opportunities. Above all, “it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.” If there is a God, we certainly are in his hands, and the final issues of life are with him. Very often, even in this life, we come to see that what we deemed to be errors, were working out higher purposes of good. The faith that all things, even our blunders and mistakes, work together for good to those who love God, is not to be reserved for hours of devotion, but to be taken into the interpretation of daily life.— Selected.