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Five Minute Friday: Regret


Regret - this is only a 5-minute Friday post so I will not try to list all of the things I regret. As Richard from Texas says in Eat Pray Love, I have oceans of regret. I have dog paddled so long in that ocean of regret that I have thought about just letting the water pull me under. But the thing I have discovered is that regret gets you nowhere unless you learn from it. And unless you have access to a time machine, regret gets you nowhere fast.

So when I thought about what I would make my word of the year, progress is what I chose. (Not writing a post on my word of the year is regret #26 on my list.) I would make lists and when I hadn't marked anything off of them, or the sufficient number of things off, I would chuck the list and give up. Lent is a perfect example. I do really well when I chose to give up something but if I make a resolution to pray more or like I did this year and tried to follow Ann Voskamp's Lent series and fail, I'd feel like a failure and I'm sure I"m going to hell.

But this year is different. Progress towards a goal is the way to live without regret. If you leave your house a little cleaner than when you got up, or cooked 2 more times this week than you did last week, that's progress. And that is good enough. It is so much better to concentrate on progress than regret. Progress encourages, regret discourages.

I am doing my best to live in 2018 without regret. Even when last week marked the 10th anniversary my X asked for a divorce and I chose this week to correspond with him via email, even if it was innocently to forward some mail he got, no regrets. Because the one thing I have figured out is that regret seems to accompany questioning God. If we think we are powerful enough to control the situations we regret in our life, that means God wasn't in control. And questioning God is one regret I do not want to carry with me.

So in 2018, I decided to trade in the car with the strong gas odor that scared me every day to drive for a car that will be dependable for the near future. And I haven't regretted it for a single minute. I have gone to bed almost every night concentrating on the progress I made and have stop wading in that ocean of regret.

Life is too short for regrets. And if you live in a way that trusts God, there is nothing regrettable about that at all.




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  1. AnonymousMarch 2, 2018 at 7:44 PM

    Andrea, there is so much I love about this post, but especially these things: Progress encourages, regret discourages.

    &

    If we think we are powerful enough to control the situations we regret in our life, that means God wasn't in control.

    This last sentence is going to make me ponder for awhile.

    I love your honesty and picture of you and the (new?) car at the top. :)

    Visiting from fmf. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. LeslieMarch 2, 2018 at 11:36 PM

    And if you live in a way that trusts God, there is nothing regrettable about that at all.

    so true

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lesley CrawfordMarch 3, 2018 at 7:19 AM

    I love your word for the year. Celebrating progress we've made, however small, is so good and takes a lot of the pressure off. So important to hand our regrets over to God and move forward. Visiting from FMF #20.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JenniferMarch 3, 2018 at 12:37 PM

    Enjoyed your post (visiting from FMF)...and congrats on progress! Great word for the year -

    ReplyDelete

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