How To Live Without Regrets (Strange Wisdom: Part 3)

Psalm 84:1-7

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

What’s on your “bucket list?”  The tricky thing about Bucket Lists is that they presume we have plenty of time, or at least some time.  That isn’t always how life draws to a close.  Often we don’t get time to make amends and mark things off of our to do list.  So a bucket list is good, if you have time.  Better yet is to summon your best energy to lead the kind of life that will result in peace and contentment when we approach the end of life as we know it.

I have a few regrets, what about you?

At age 14 I quit taking piano lessons.  I thought I was too busy.

In my junior year of High School I ordered a class ring even though my parents offered me cash instead and my older brothers told me to take the cash.

In the late 1990’s, E-trade made it possible for individual investors to pick their own stocks.  I invested $2,000 (the minimum) in an E-trade account, bought some stocks and promptly lost 70% of that money over the next couple of years. 

I once passed up a good job that I’d take if I had it to do over again.

These are a few of the regrets that I’m willing to share with you, in public.  There are some more serious and profound regrets, but this isn’t the time or place to rehearse those.  And I don’t expect you to voice out loud your deepest regrets either. 

But I do want us to have an honest, challenging, and I hope inspiring conversation about the kinds of lives we want to live, and about the kinds of changes we can start making today so that we can live in ways that aren’t imprisoned by regret.

Here’s the myth I want to address today: A life full of regrets is unavoidable.  All we can do is enjoy the present moment, maximize our own individual happiness, and avoid any prolonged reflection on what could have been different.

2 Timothy 4

Our reading for today comes to us as tender words shared near the end of life by a Christian leader who has suffered a great deal.  My life, he says, has been “poured out like a drink offering.”  And “the time of my departure is near.”  Here is a person near the end of his life reflecting with utter clarity and seriousness about his life.  These are the dying words of a troubled apostle.  If we can listen to them, we can begin taking stock of the shape of our own lives.  And we can even seek God’s help in making some changes if that’s what needs to be done. 

Paul looks back across his life and says, I have been “poured out like a drink offering.”  What does that mean?  Well, it means that he sees his life as an offering, a kind of gift offered back to God.  And it means that the offering has reached its fullness.  It has been fully poured out.  To view your own life as an offering poured out in the worship of God requires a conversion in the deepest sense.  It involves coming to see your own life as way of offering back to God what was given you by God in the first place.  It involves living your own life to the full, practicing the music that was your own, making the most of your own strengths, finding ways to bless others by being yourself and acting out of your own, unique identity as one of God’s beloved children.

But if our lives can be an offering, they can also feel like a long and difficult race.  The writer also describes his life as an intense, long distance race, full of agony, run through to the very end so as to receive a reward.

As we reflect today on our own lives, perhaps we can find encouragement and guidance from the verbs used in this passage . . . “I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I kept the faith.”

I fought the good fight . . . The point is that his life has not been easy.  It has required strenuous effort, as if one had been competing in the Olympic games.

 

I finished the race . . . It was long, like a marathon, requiring endurance and resilience.  This was a race long enough to discourage the faint of heart, full of enough hills and challenges, setbacks and surprises, to defeat those who thought it would be easy.

I kept the faith . . . This is a race that can be finished, and finished well.  Paul says, I valued and guarded the gift of the good news of Jesus Christ, which was handed down to me by my ancestors.  I “kept the faith”.

We might assume that the early Christians were superstars capable of feats of faith that ordinary people like us could never accomplish.  We might assume that someone like Paul was so devoted to God, so saintly, so pious, that at the very end there was full serenity as he looked to his past.  Keep in mind that Paul spent the first half of his life arresting Christians and overseeing their punishment by death. And even at the end of life, there were painful memories of betrayal by friends and harm suffered at the hands of those close to him (v. 16).  But what is remarkable is that these painful memories are not accompanied by continuing bitterness and dreams of revenge.  Instead, they are accompanied by a tender, beautiful prayer for his opponents: “May it not be counted against them!”

When Paul looks back on his life, he is not fixated on his own wrong-doing.  Nor is he fixated on complaining against God about the difficult parts of his life.  What he does instead is make a confession: “I was rescued from the Lion’s mouth.”  Will that be your testimony at the end of life?  That you were rescued?  Were you rescued from loneliness?  From greed?  From a lack of confidence?  From feelings of shame?  From anger and hate, grudges and revenge?  From the prison of a cold heart to a life of compassion for others?   I don’t know what the central threat has been to your life.  But I know that God can and does rescue you from it.  And I know that part of living a life not defined by regret involves welcoming the news of being rescued into the center of who we are.

Paul was ashamed that he spent the first half of his life harassing the followers of Jesus.  He was frustrated by the many ways people had betrayed his trust and undermined his leadership.  But those painful realities weren’t the deepest framework of his life.  The deepest framework involved seeing his life as an offering and an endurance race.  What mattered most was that his life, taken as a whole, was a confession of praise: “To God be the glory forever and ever.  Amen.”  This is the final line of a life lived faithfully.  This is the desire that keeps burning at the end of a life: may God be glorified in my life and in all things. 

Life is like a great hymn, sung full throttle all the way through to the very end: “To God be the glory forever and ever.  Amen.”  A life lived without regrets is not a perfect life.  Nor is it a life without mistakes and failures.  It is a life whose basic melody is a song of gratitude and praise, a life shot-through with desire to share in the largeness of God’s gracious dream of a world renewed in love.

In 1938, Harvard University started tracking two groups of men in the Boston area.  In one group were Harvard students.  In another group were poor boys from an inner city Boston neighborhood.  That program has had four directors over the course of its 80-year life-span.  It is now the longest running survey of happiness, joy, and meaning in life.

Do you know what makes people happy and makes life meaningful according to the 80 year happiness study?  It’s not about a rewarding career, good pay, respect, or even good health.  It’s not really about avoiding mistakes and regrets either.  It’s about relationships.  Warm, affectionate, trusting relationships keep us healthy and happy.

Here is how the current director of the happiness project summarized the findings in a recent TED talk:

1.     Social connections are good for us and loneliness kills.

2.     It’s not the number of friends or committed relationships you have, it’s the quality of your relationships that matter.  If you’re connected to others but those connections are of low quality – i.e. full of conflict and lacking warmth and trust – then those connections do not sustain us.

3.     Good relationships protect not just our bodies but also our brains.  People in warm, trusting, affectionate relationships not only live longer; their mental health and memories stay sharper longer too.

He ended his talk by making this point: high quality relationships are what keep us happy and healthy, and yet clearly this is not a quick fix.  Relationships are messy and involve lots of effort.  Working at our relationships is a life-long process that never ends.  Is it really any surprise that the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ has created us to find our deepest joy in caring, trusting relationships with other people?

In 2009, artist Candy Chang created a space on a public wall in New Orleans with the prompt Before I die _________________________.  Within days the wall was completely filled.  People wrote things like Before I die, I want to straddle the international dateline.  Before I die, I want to sing for millions.  Before I die, I want to be completely myself. . . . Before I die, I would like to have a relationship with my sister.  Be a great dad.  Go skydiving.  Make a difference in someone’s life.  (Gottlieb, ch. 12).  Today, we can begin to write something new in that space for ourselves.

To be alive as a human being – with limited reserves of energy, limited abilities, limited resources – requires that we make a thousand decisions on the fly, take a thousand risks even when we can’t be sure how things will wind up.  Surely we will come to regret some of the decisions we made, positions we held, attitudes we harbored, relationships we betrayed, and opportunities we missed.  These past mistakes, blunders, wrong turns, betrayals and omissions are part of life.

And yet God’s love leads us forward into a new kind of life that doesn’t have to be more of the same.  God’s forgiveness and healing allow us to begin to see ourselves playfully.  We can laugh at ourselves, because our lives are not some kind of resume where we hide with shame what we regret.  Our lives are an act of praise, an offering to God of our best efforts to love one another and of our failures to do so, all as part of our own confession, “To God be glory forever and ever, Amen.”