If We Miss the Spring…

“The course of life is… run but in one way, and only once.”¹ This was said of youth as it moves into old age, but it has its application in other ways also. People sometimes punish themselves ceaselessly for past decisions: for mistakes in judgment, for lack of foresight, for not having seen some things sooner. We make mistakes; we ignore experience; we fail at times to heed the still small voice, the warning sense within us. Often we don’t look forward very far, and make short-sighted decisions. We are human; we are imperfect; and there is much that all of us would change pertaining to the past. But we should not, we must not, let this keep us from improving the present. The process of repentance isn’t simply brooding about it. It isn’t simply feeling sorry. It is more, even, than admitting mistakes. It includes an obligation to improve upon the past, using present possibilities — for the making of a finer future. And one of the most wasteful ways of living life is to let regret for things missed or mismanaged lead us to a blind kind of brooding which says “because I can’t have what I could have had, I will not live thankfully for what I can have.” We can rerun memories, but we can’t rerun life, and once we have lived through any hour we never go back to precisely the same set of circumstances. It is now and from here on that is our opportunity. There are penalties for errors; there are punishments for misdeeds; there are habits to overcome, decisions to regret, mistakes for which to make amends. Never, it seems, do we use fully the judgment, the intelligence the Lord God has given. But life runs one way, and we cannot rerun it. But we can make the present better than it would have been if we had simply brooded and felt sorry for ourselves. Paul said it in this incisive sentence: “…this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth with those things which are before, I press toward the mark…”² If we miss the spring, we’d better take the summer. If we miss the summer, we’d better take the succeeding seasons — and not needlessly let the past make us also miss the present or the future that is forever before us.