2013 was a year filled with regret. My husband and I had to make some incredibly painful choices about moving on from a community that we loved. Night after night, we tortured ourselves by revisiting decisions we had made, conversations that had gone awry, and cues that we apparently missed. After months of this addictive, futile behavior, we sobered up and resolutely decided to let go. To free fall. There was no next job lined up and no suggested six months of savings. The college tuition, mortgage, food, oil, and medical bills did not magically stop—a reality which sometimes looped us back into our little regret binges.

“Regret was never meant to be a destination,” writes Michelle Van Loon in her new book, If Only: Letting Go of Regret. But for most of us, it’s not only a destination but a way of life.

We regret eating that piece of pie. We regret hitting send before we toned down the sarcasm. We regret buying that extra pair of shoes, not asking for a raise, not spending more time with an aging parent.

The key words connected to regret are, I wish. Regret leaves us wishing we had made different choices and longing for a redo. It hoodwinks us into believing that if we work something long enough, we will be able to create an alternate universe where everything comes out perfect (a la Bill Murray in Groundhog Day). Meanwhile, as the sun continues to rise and set on the rest of humanity, we remain immobilized—or perhaps more accurately, moving only in reverse.

We all know that rewriting the script only happens in Hollywood. We can’t have a redo. However, we don’t have to remain mired in regret. If instead of hitting the rewind button, we push pause and initiate a conversation with God, regret, much like anger, can help us grow. The apostle Paul wrote, “For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation…. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death.” Replace the word sorrow with regret, and we gain a deeper understanding of the redemptive purpose regret can have in our lives.

In order to glean the gift embedded in regret, we need to recognize how eddying around and around makes us so dizzy that we lose our ability to grab hold of God’s mercy and grace. The enemy of our soul would love to suck us forever down in a whirlpool of regret and shame. We stop the centrifugal force when we give ourselves permission to grieve our losses and bring our sin and shame to the One who has the power to forgive and release us.

Unprocessed regret can often causes us to make reactive decisions. According to Van Loon, “Regret creates false boundaries out of the woulda, coulda, shouldas that exist in our lives. For instance, I may regret not finishing college–and that regret may translate into not only the logical consequence for that action (“I will never be a brain surgeon.”) but the false boundary, or lie, that might mean settling for a career I hate and for which I am not suited.”

“Regret is a thief.” And indeed, as my husband and I hyper-processed our situation, an entire year slipped past. We eventually made the unilateral decision to stop entertaining the woulda, coulda, shouldas and, having done all that we knew to do, simply wait–in faith–for God to redeem our mistakes and our losses. Van Loon hopefully concludes, “If we have been called to follow Jesus out of the prison of our regrets, then he will use all things—including our poor choices and the painful ways in which the sins of others have affected our lives—for his redemptive purposes.”

Read my article on Regret written for Relevant magazine last year.

Read my review of If Only (and LOTS of other books) at Goodreads.

Buy Michelle’s book. (Trust me, you won’t regret it!)

Read more of her work @ Patheos.

And if you like what your see, please consider supporting me on Patreon and subscribing to my site.