"Regrets, I've Had A Few..........."

By John Stallings


Sarah was rich.

She had inherited twenty million dollars, plus she had an additional income of one thousand dollars a day. That was a lot of money in the late 1800s.

Sarah was well known & powerful. Her name would open any door in America & all sorts of organizations clamored for her support.

Sarah was rich, well known, powerful, and miserable. Her only daughter died at five weeks of age & her husband died leaving her with her name, her money, her memories & her guilt.

Sarah chose a strange way to deal with her guilt. She moved from Connecticut to San Jose

California & bought an eight-room farmhouse on one-hundred sixty acres. Over the years I’ve passed in front of this house several times but have never seen inside. Sarah hired sixteen carpenters & put them to work. For the next thirty-eight years the craftsmen labored every day, twenty-four hours a day to build a mansion.

This place has a macabre touch, even when driving by it. Each window has thirteen panes, each wall thirteen panels, each closet thirteen hooks, & each chandelier thirteen globes. Corridors in the house snake randomly some leading nowhere. One door opened to a blank wall & one to a fifty-foot drop. One set of stairs led to a ceiling that had no door. Trap doors. Secret passageways. Tunnels. This was no retirement home for Sarah; it was a castle for her past.

There were visitors…… The visitors came each night. Legend has it that every evening a servant would pass through the secret labyrinth that led to the bell tower. He would ring the bell…to summon the spirits. Sarah would then enter the “blue room,” a room reserved for her night time guests. Together they would linger until 2:00 a.m. Then Sarah would return to her quarters & the ghosts would return to their graves.

What guests, what ghosts? Indians & soldiers killed on the U.S frontier by bullets from the most popular rifle in America---the Winchester. What had brought millions of dollars to Sarah Winchester had brought death to them. So Sarah spent her remaining years providing a home for the dead.

You could visit the Winchester mansion if you wished to & walk the halls & see its remains if you’re into poltergeist, & see first hand what unresolved guilt can do to a human being. Truth be told, we don’t have to “know the way to San Jose” to see such a spectacle. We can see lives imprisoned by yesterday’s guilt & shame in our own cities. Lives haunted by failure are all around us. They are just down the street or down the hall. Do you know any Sarah Winchesters?

Frank Sinatra sang the song “My way” back in 1969, & it became his signature song. 

Actually Paul Anka wrote the song. In the song was the line... “Regrets…I’ve had a few…but then again…too few to mention...” It was a song sung to celebrate a tough life, a full life, a planned life, a life where a man stands tall, takes the blows, relies on himself & does it his way.

This song is nonsense of course.

But it was the kind of nonsense that people bought & bought into, a life where I’m in control & I call the shots, a life with few if any regrets.

In truth, there is no such thing as a life lived with no regrets in the literal sense because we all fall short in so many ways. Only Jesus could say “It is finished” & know that He had perfectly completed all that God had for Him to do & He never made a single mistake doing it. The rest of us will struggle with a sense of failure, of jobs left undone, of projects left unfinished, of dreams unfulfilled, of steps not taken, or roads not traveled, or decisions made that now seem like wrong choices. I see no way to escape this.

There are many things we can look back on with joy & cling to them as “precious memories.” But sadly there are certain events in all of our lives that we remember with regret. While it would be wonderful to live a life of no regrets, it isn’t in the realm of possibility. By the time one reaches old age, & generally long before, one can look back & see things he wishes he’d done differently. Sometimes the regretful experiences are only mildly disturbing but other things can so upset a life that they lead to mental breakdown or illness.

In any life & in any family, even the best of them, there are regrets. Things don’t always turn out right. Parents disappoint us. Children don’t always turn out the way we hope. As hard as we try we can’t always get it together & make things turn out right. Things happen. People change. Words get said that can never be taken back. And our lives are forever altered.

Let’s go back & look at some famous men in the Bible & see if they had any regrets.

ADAM

There can be no doubt that our great ancestor had deep regrets. After all he lived in paradise & had access to the tree of life, meaning he was looking at unending life. He didn’t have to do any hard labor because everything was there for the taking. God walked with Adam in the garden, so for a time he had full fellowship with Him. Adam gave it all up.

I can imagine that many times as he toiled, he thought about how he blew it. He gave up the good life & exchanged it for fighting thorns & thistles & realized that his destiny now was to be dust himself. I can’t imagine Adam seeing how his children suffered & coming to terms with the magnitude of what he’d done wouldn’t have filled him with regret for his transgression.

SAMUEL

I can’t recall of a single passage in the Bible that speaks ill of Samuel. He was God’s man & he judged Israel all the days of his life. Samuel was a prophet who we find in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews along with the others in faith’s hall of fame. But Samuel in his old age made his sons judges over Israel & they were a deep disappointment to him to say the least. When a child goes wrong, the first thing a parent wonders is where they went wrong in their parenting. It would be hard to imagine anything more regrettable that would cut a man deeper than this one.

ANCIENT ISRAEL

God delivered these folk from Egyptian slavery & offered them the Promised Land & they had so little faith they turned back from Canaan into the wilderness. What regrets they must have had as they wandered back & forth, up & down until everyone above twenty was dead.

DAVID

David was the common shepherd boy who stood up to the Philistines & killed their giant warrior with a sling. When the Lord saw that Saul was unfit to continue to lead Israel David was crowned king. Under David’s rule the nation of Israel went from a backwater group of nomads to the shining star of the Mid East.

Though David was a great man & Israel’s greatest king, he stumbled into gross sin with Bathsheba. He had a great record but sadly it was marred by adultery, lying & murder. In many ways it’s hard to accept that a man who was after God’s own heart could have such a blot on his record. The majesty of much of David’s life wasn’t sufficient to erase the ugliness of his transgressions. We don’t have to wonder if David had regrets. All we have to do is read what he wrote, especially the forty-first & fifty-first Psalms to see the evidence of his regrets relating to his moral breakdown.

The Lord sent the prophet Nathan to face the king with his sin & David repented. True repentance is a dynamic, life changing experience that looks forward not backward.

I love the words David wrote in Psalm 103: 12—As far as the east is from the west so far has God removed our transgressions from us. David could well have adopted Frank Sinatra’s song, “regrets I’ve had a few…...” & so might you.

David reaped a lot through his children. Absalom, a son David loved murdered Amnon, another son of David. A while later Absalom tried to take the kingdom away from his father. David had to flee the save his own life. Later when Absalom was killed in battle & David got the news, he wept—“O Absalom my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” What sorrow, what regret. Later, David’s son Solomon had another son of David’s put to death, Adonijah.

Moving into the New Testament we first look at;

JUDAS

It would be difficult to conceive of anyone having more regrets than did this turncoat & traitor. Though Judas did take the blood-money back & throw it at his accomplices, his deep regret is evidenced in his suicide. But think about this; Judas has been in hell for many hundreds of years & has had all this time to think about & regret what he did. Not only that, he still has all eternity to wallow in hell’s flames & wish he’d never been born.

THE APOSTLE PETER

Here’s another on our list of people who had deep regrets. In one way Peter did worse than Judas because he swore an oath that he never knew Jesus. As an aside, the difference in these two men I believe is the cross. By that I mean if Judas had gotten the revelation of what Christ’s death meant, he might not have taken his own life. If he’d lived long enough to see that the very essence of Calvary was to offer full & free pardon, he might have held on until he could be forgiven like Peter did.

Peter’s life & experience is an encouragement to all those who need to repent & turn around. Peter spent the rest of his life trying to erase the memory in his mind & in the mind of others of his failure. As sad as his failure was, his life after Christ forgave him was exemplary. Peter went on, according to tradition, to be crucified upside down for his Lord. May we all be as successful as Peter.

PAUL

Paul’s life is so well known that we need not spend all that much time with him here. Do you think Paul had any regrets? In Acts 22, when he described how he persecuted Christians, he said, “I persecuted this way—to the death.Vr.4. What did he mean by…to the death? One wonders how many orphans he left because of the killing & jailing sprees he conducted. He was on his way to wreak more havoc when God put him under arrest on the Damascus Turnpike. Do you think those regrets ever completely passed from his thoughts as he lived day to day? I don’t think so. If ever a man lived who must have longed to rewrite his past it had to be Paul. But he was able to get victory by turning his past over to Christ. He died out to self & let faith in the living Lord renew his life.

There are so many others that we could mention, but;

THE QUESTION BECOMES WHAT WILL WE DO WITH OUR FAILURES?

Though God can forgive & forget everything that has been wrong in our lives, we aren’t that capable. The Lord has been able to bury all our yesterdays but maybe we haven’t been able to bury them that deeply. Our horizons are shorter. We may still get troubling thoughts & try as we may we can’t get the thoughts outside our head & hearts.

IF ONLY

Maybe these words keep playing in our head…if only. If only I’d heeded the advice of my parents I wouldn’t be where I am. If only I’d been paying attention I wouldn’t have these problems. If only, if only, if only. To have appropriate & legitimate feelings of regret is one thing. But to allow our failures to shape & dominate us forever is something different.

On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister was the first man to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. Within 2 months John Landy eclipsed the record & on August 7, 1954 the two met together for a historic race. As they moved into the last lap, Landy held the lead. It looked as if he’d win but as he neared the finish he was haunted by the question “where is Bannister?” As he turned to look Bannister took the lead.

Landy later told a reporter, “If only I hadn’t looked back I would have won.” The devil wants us to look back & dwell on the past but we need to keep our eyes trained on the future.

The prophet Joel said, I will restore to you the years that the locusts have wasted. The life Christ gives to us isn’t about constantly ransacking the archives of our lives. It’s about standing face to face with the resurrected Christ & saying… “We’re not going to talk about this anymore.” There’s no way you & I can recreate segments of our private histories, we’re stuck with them. We can’t alter a painful past any more than we can control a threatening future. But God recreates our past by forgiving it.

So the key is to say, “I’m not going to live in the past. I won’t let my yesterdays define who I am today. By God’s grace I’ll go forward one day at a time, one step at a time, trusting God to lead me, following the Lord to the best of my ability, believing that with Christ the best is always yet to come. In the spiritual life it’s not where we’ve been but where we’re going that matters.

Grab hold of God’s pardon & rejoice in knowing that Jesus Christ is your advocate & there are no accusations coming from heaven.

Your forgiveness & your future are grounded in the love of Christ.

Blessings,

John