Regret!!! Life is full of it. In it's simplest form, regret is just the mindset of wishing you would have done something different, usually because of the outcome of a decision. I try to teach my children to not have regret in life because it is very hard to fix.
My life is full of regret; I wish I would have tried harder in school, I wish I would have been closer to my grand parents whom are all dead now, I wish I would have insisted on playing Line-Backer full time instead of Defensive End, I wish I would have had short hair, I wish I would have tried contacts sooner, I wish I would have taken my relationship with God seriously, I wish I would have maintained friendships...... I think you get the picture.
Now what does all of this have to do with wishing my brother (Jody Knight) a Happy Birthday? Well its simple, I have a lot of regret when it comes to the way I handled our relationship as children. Anyone who knows us knows that we have completely different personalities and we always have since birth. Basically, his personality was good and mine was bad. I loved my brother but I was jealous of him because he was "cuter" or "nicer" than I was. When you couple that jealousy with the fact that I was mean , I was more of a bully than a brother much of the time.
Now don't get me wrong, we had a lot of fun. We played football, baseball, and Nerf-hoop in our bedroom all the time and we played in the woods, swung on muscadine vines, played in the creek in the woods, went swimming, and rode our bikes a lot. But for anyone who has ever been in a bad relationship, the memories that tend to stand out aren't the good ones, its the bad. It would be too easy for me to tell too much about the negative so I think that I will just leave it at "I was mean to my brother, too mean".
After all these years I love my brother very much and I always have. I have always been very proud of him. I have the utmost respect for my brother. He was a great athlete in school, he was was always smarter than me, and he beat me at every video game we ever played. Now, he is a strong, reliable, Christian man. He is a loving husband and loving father. Like me, he isn't perfect but I think he is a lot closer than I am. I've done what I know to do to let him know that I love him and I know that he knows that I love him. The problem is that word "regret". I just can't help but wonder how things would be today (for both of us and our families) if I would have let the love of Christ overshadow my relationship with my brother.
And you? Do you have any regret like me? You can't go back and undo what has been done but you can ask for forgiveness and then move on. Maybe you were on the other end of the stick and you are harboring hard feelings because of the way you were treated. You must forgive.
Regret isn't healthy but it is a fact. All we can do is live our lives from this point on with no regret. If you live today completely for Jesus, then tomorrow, you won't regret what you did yesterday.
I love you and God does too!
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