No Regrets

Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:13-14 NIV

Picture yourself at the end of your life. You are very old, and your time on this earth is almost at an end. You begin to recall your life as a picture-show unfolding before your eyes. What do you see?

The thought of living with no regrets has been on my mind very heavily today. I have often read that we should live our lives today as if it were our last. Why is this such a good idea, yet so hard to carry out? Possibly because we just don't see death as that real? Possibly because we think on some level, "That's not going to happen to me!" I've got news, my friends...

One definition of regret that I found stated, "to feel disappointed or distressed about; to be sorry for, a sense of loss or expression of grief; a feeling of sorrow. When I think of life through the lens of regret, I personally would like to have the least amount of this feeling that I could possibly have at the end of my life. I desire to live as Paul, "forgetting" the past and looking to what is ahead.

But, what is ahead, my friends? Is more of our past ahead, just to be rehashed and reformatted into a different time, a different place, among different people? Have we taken the time to evaluate our lives and to ask ourselves, "What kinds of things will I regret at the end of my life?" As we do this in humility, the Lord will show us areas in which we can and should make changes in order to have "no regrets."

What is it we were created for? Are we living this out? We were created to know the Lord and to worship Him forever. After all, we will meet this Jesus whom we call Lord. We will meet Him, and it is crucial that we know Him when we do. Seek Jesus as your prize. Seek Him as your goal. May we live a life, saved and set apart by Christ, that we can say we have no regrets. May we grow old and gray and be able to look in the face of our Lord with joy and not sorrow, with ecstasy and not agony; with hope and not despair.