From somewhere I got a message ‘way back last January:
“This is not the year for you to get everything you want; it is the year for you to be grateful for everything you have.”
Because I wanted to quote this and not commit plagiarism, I looked up the origin of the saying, and I found it attributed to Phillips Brooks, in 1916. Before any of us clever people had ever been born.
Frankly, the principle expressed seems simple. Maybe you tend to think, as I do, that the truth it states is rather obvious and any of us might happen to blurt it out, half thinking, at some enlightened moment.
However, we didn’t, and our lives are full of things we don’t want as well as things we worked hard to get, and being thankful for some experiences is difficult.
Regrets hang around. I don’t know about you, but I did not get to be 95 with nothing but good memories. I regret some things I did, things I said, things I didn’t say, some mere blunders but some because I was mad or resentful or just weak. Sometimes these mistakes jump on me in the dark, in the middle of the night when I would otherwise be asleep.
However, this whole year I have read a lot of Richard Rohr’s work. He makes me think more deeply than I might otherwise, and sometimes I am thrilled and sometimes I am not sure I understand. Maybe I was a little bit of both (thrilled and mystified) when I read in one of his books: “Don’t regret anything, because God has already used it.”
Now there’s an idea I love! I want it to be true—that God used my careless word, my failure to act when I should have, my wrong choice. I know that God can do what I can’t imagine, but. . .
And now I have come to the kind of place where Rohr asks his reader which experience taught you something: the good thing you did that worked out okay or the mistake you made? And I saw it clearly. I learn mostly from my mistakes.
I remember once when another woman, younger than I, came to me with a difficult decision to make. She described the situation to which she had to respond somehow. There were two possibilities and she told me what they were. Each had some good thinking behind it. And each carried a risk, a way it could go wrong for the person she meant to help or for their relationship. Which should she do?
I asked her, “Which will you regret the most, if it turns out to be wrong?”
And immediately she knew what to do.
How did I know to tell her that? Because I had been in a similar situation and made the wrong decision. Years later I remembered and regretted.
On the other hand, if I told Richard Rohr this story, he would say that I should stop regretting what I did. Yes, it was wrong. But making the mistake taught me so that I would know next time. And so that I could pass on this bit of wisdom.
God had used my mistake.
Of course there is another person involved, the person to whom I gave bad advice. How did God use my mistake for her benefit?
I don’t know.
This is the question that requires an exercise of faith. God did not love me more than the other. If God used the mistake for my long-term benefit, surely God did the same for the person I somehow failed. I guess. I hope.
I suppose this might be the kind of experience behind Paul’s scriptural testimony that all things work together for good to those who love God. “All things.” Bad advice. Good decisions. Dumb mistakes.
So I beat myself up for something God has already used.
I still don’t like remembering my failures, but this is a year that I don’t get everything I want, just gratitude for everything I have.