How many times has it been said, ‘I didn’t know how much I loved her,’ or ‘I wish I had done more while he was alive.’ How sad are such statements. Instead of ‘I wish I had done it,’ why not substitute something like this: ‘I will wish I had done it so I will do it now; then I will not have to wish that I had done it.’
Look toward the future to the day when you will miss a relationship. Picture yourself without it; become prematurely nostalgic, and you will appreciate the relationship more in the present. This eliminates remorse and remorse is the hurt of nostalgia.
In Ecclesiastes 12:1 we have a man whose life had been lived with much of it being lived foolishly. Looking back over his life he had remorse. Here are some ideas to take the remorse out of the future:
1. Make relationships the most important thing in life.
It is easy to use patients to build a hospital, to use students to build a school, and to use a family to keep a clean house. But the purpose of a house is to care for children. The purpose for school is to educate the student. The purpose of the hospital is to heal the patient. The individual is all important. Relationships should be nourished and cultivated.
2. Plan every relationship carefully.
Each person has a few basic relationships in life. For example, I am a son, a husband, a father, a brother, and a friend. I must look carefully at these relationships and plan to be my best in each one. It is unbelievable, yet true, that we spend less time preparing for life’s most important relationships. The pastor may spend 7-10 years in preparation. The doctor may spend more than that. The school teacher spends many years in preparation, but the sad truth is that many of us spend little or no time preparing to be a wife, husband, brother, sister, mother, father, or friend. Each of us should become an expert in being what he should be in each of life’s relationships.
3. Make every experience with every relationship a sacred one.
Life is so brief, and no experience can be recalled. Because of this fact, each experience should be squeezed to its fullest. If we make the most of every relationship of life, and if we make the most of every experience of life, then there will be no remorse in days to come. If we go through life not realizing the importance of our relationships and the depth of our experiences, we will wake up one day realizing the hours, days, and years that were wasted, at least, partially, because our mind did not absorb the depth of life’s experiences. Someday we will look back upon them and find that we did not take advantage of them. This causes remorse.
We should look out into the future and predict what things could bring us remorse. We then should predict what causes such remorse and should set about immediately to eliminate them in the present and avoid the remorse in the future. This will give us today… premature nostalgia.
Here’s a good poem written by missionary C.T. Studd
Only one life, ’twill soon be past,
Only what’s done for Christ will last.
And when I’m dying, how happy I’ll be,
If the lamp of my life has been burned out for Thee.