What to Do With Regrets?

What to Do With Regrets?

Do you have regrets? Or are you carrying bitterness or hurt around? Do you keep your real feelings from God? Do you only bring the good in you before God and deal with the bad on your own?

Many of us do just that. We might forget the regrets for the most of the time but they are there. We might hold ourselves accountable and don’t forgive ourselves our own wrong doings. We might have been badly hurt and we can’t forgive and forget. We might keep on the cheery face before God and our church and cry alone. Or we might want to keep our good life and bad life separated. Like God would not know!

What waste! Don’t we believe in the resurrection power? Don’t we know that nothing scares God away? Don’t we know God loves nothing more than creating beauty out of ugliness? Don’t we know that God wants all of us, not just small portions of us? Don’t we know that God hates divided lives? Don’t we believe in the power of grace?

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12: 1-2, MSG)

We are called to bring everything to God so he can create something beautiful out of our ugly nothingness. God knows we have sinned. He knows we have failed. God knows our bad habits, he knows we have hurts and regrets. God knows we have bad days. God knows our worries, concerns, and deep sorrows. God knows everything. And he still loves us more than we can ever know.

What can we do? What can we do that we could be made whole? What can we do that we could be truly free and happy in the Lord. No more fake stuff. What can we do that we could really leave the past behind and look forward to the future?

We can bring everything to God in prayer. We can dump all our worries, regrets, failures, secrets, sorrows to God. We can ask him to forgive us, heal us, change us, create something beautiful out of our ugliness. And He will!

God is a potter. He can create something new out of our brokenness. We can’t undo our mistakes. We can’t help or heal ourselves. But God can. If we bring our excess baggage, all the pieces of our pot to God we can be sure nothing will go to waste. God will use the same clay to make another pot.

What happens if we don’t bring our baggage to God? We stay broken, chipped or chattered and we might not be of use for God. But if we bring all the pieces of our lives to God he will put our lives together and a sense of wholeness will come and settle in us. Don’t ever lose sight of the grace of God! There’s no other way to live without regrets.

Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. (Philippians 4: 6-7, MSG)

 

Gracious God,
We bring ourselves to you.
Everything, the good and the bad.
Forgive us, heal us, renew us.
Put us together, make us whole again.
Create something new and meaningful
out of our messed up lives.
Thank you for your powerful grace.
Help us to embrace it so fully
that we can live without secrets and regrets.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen

 

Q4U: What are you experiences of being (re)mold by the Potter?

Be blessed, my fellow pilgrim, as you bring both good and bad to God! Wait for good because God is good!

Photo courtesy of Marian Trinidad

4 thoughts on “What to Do With Regrets?

  1. I’ve been dealing with my own regrets and bitterness for a long time. It’s been destroying me from inside. Even being a child of God, I still held on to those broken pieces of me. Through all this mess God remained faithful and kind. He brought people, Bible verses, experiences in my life that kept reminding me of my need to surrender to God fully, with all the brokenness and pain, and trust Him even when my life made no sense. I am still struggling at times, but I praise God for patiently teaching me to trust Him even with the broken pieces, for He is a great Artist, creating with those random pieces a beautiful mosaics of my life. Thank you for this post, that has reminded me of God’s amazing work in each person’s life!

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