Regretting | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 1, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 27.

Regretting.

Some Good Common Sense to Mix with Genuine Christianity.

ONCE there was a good woman with a conviction that she was called of Heaven to lift a section of the slums of her city. She dropped her housework and lifted like everything. But she was hampered in her success by a distressing, domestic circumstance. She had a husband and some children and a home. While the mother's missionary face wore a perennial golden glow, the family and the home wore sackcloth and ashes. The home surroundings reminded you of the spot where the soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers; "there was lack of woman's nursing; there was dearth of woman's tears." Mother finally recognized this hampering domestic limitation and fell to regretting that she had ever married, and so cut off a career of blessed helpfulness to the world. This chronic regret of course was a source of cheer to the husband and the children!

Years ago we had a little minister at our church in the country who had an abiding regret that he had never learned to read the Bible in the original Greek and Hebrew. He was sure he could have gotten so much more out of the text in the original; but his time for such study had gone by. A wife and three babies stood between him and a theological course. So he pined and mourned and finally got a fixed pathos in his daily vocalization like unto that in the voice of your invalid Aunt Isabel, who walked on the edge of the grave for eighty-four years and finally died in spite of her infirmities.

I once was in the home of a thrifty farmer of ninety-four years who owned a fine quarter-section in a beautiful valley near the St. Lawrence River. He had prospered and had much to thank Providence for; but he had a big smothering regret. "O, my boy," he said to me, "If I'd a' only took the Bealses quarter across the road when I come here fifty-four year ago I'd o' hit it! I'd o' hit it! But it was a dollar a acre more'n this, an' I couldn't seet no dollar's wuth in that more'n this, and so I tuck this. Now Bealses is wuth nigh fifteen dollar a' acre more'n mine. Fifteen a' acre on a 160 acres makes $2,400. Think on it! Me a lettin' $2,400 slip out'n my fingers like a plumb fool!" The neighbors told me that the old man had been heaving that $2,400 sigh for forty years.

If the farmer instead of raising his sigh had put his breath into raising an extra bushel an acre for fifty-four years he could have had the Beals place beaten to a batter. And if the little minister had used his breath preaching the good tidings out of King James' Version of the Scripture, instead of sighing for a diet of Greek and Hebrew roots, he probably would have won more men over to the higher life. And as for the woman with the blasted missionary career—the saving of a husband and a few children might have been as large a job as she was capable of doing in a lifetime. We count that quite large at our house.

Regret is a dangerous medicine. One good dose is all that is safe to take for one complaint. Even then one should be dead sure he has the complaint. Taken regularly the effect is cumulative like that of opium or alcohol; it leads to the regret habit and to final and fatal soul-wilt. Have you lost the best chances in life? Very well; there is always a next best. Cheerfully go after that; make it your own. Did you lose it because of no fault of your own? Then that was not the best chance. Something better was intended for you. Did you miss it because of your own fault? Then put away the fault and get the best yet coming. Once there was an invalid man who seemed near his final collapse. "My constitution is all gone," said he cheerfully, "and I am just living on my by-laws. But I reckon I can patch out a year or two yet." And while he lived he handed out good cheer and a good example to his more husky neighbors. Such a brief life may come nearer success than the one that lugs a great big sighing, blubbering regret thru a long series of mournful years. If we find after taking our bearings that our life's way is walled in by unchangeable circumstances, let us not waste ourselves by butting the wall nor leaning against it to weep; but fitting our little plans to the larger plan, do great things with our small material. It is not what circumstances did to us, but what we did under the circumstances, that measures our life's success.—Wheat Belt Review.