My Philosophy. (or, at least, one of them.)

Happy New Year!

Yesterday, one of our chaplains (pastor for the military, in case you didn’t know) gave a sermon on this past year and the year ahead. She started out by talking about the amazing experiences that we’ve had as a church overall in 2011. She pointed out our prayer requests fulfilled, and praises worth praising God for, and even some sad moments in the past year. She spoke about how a tragedy had recently struck her life, and I could hear in her voice the severe pain that anyone feels when they encounter emotional difficulty. But through that pain, she talked about the good times she had before the tragedy struck. She said something that stuck with me.

“Never regret what you do.”

I’ve seriously thought about this, and I’ve made some adjustments to come up with a very simply stated, yet hard-to-live philosophy.

Never forget. Never regret.

I have made a lot of bad decisions in my short life. Fortunately for me, none of them have affected me to an extreme, but I’ve been heartbroken and I’ve hurt people. I will never forget who I hurt or who hurt me. But I also won’t hold any one of them or myself in contempt for the things we’ve done. People change. That’s a simple fact of life. I know I’ve changed; if it weren’t for Jesus Christ, I would not be the person I am today.

One thing Jesus has taught me is the power to forgive. It took forever to learn, and I’m still working on it, but finally I know how to forgive others and most importantly myself. I always have to remind myself that the bad choices I made are not what make me who I am. Every choice is an action to change. With everything you do, you are altering the way people look at you and the way you look at yourself. I am so grateful for the opportunity to become a better person, but at the same time, I can’t forget about my past, even though I may want to, because that is what made me the person I am today. Your past is a part of what made you the person you are today. You can’t forget that; it would be like forgetting a part of your identity.

That was the never forget. The second part is a little difficult to explain, but I’m going to try. :)

I can see it being so easy to misinterpret “Never regret.” I know a bunch of people would tell me this is ground to “live your life to the fullest”; to, in a sense, do whatever you want and not give a care what anybody thinks. But that is a TOTALLY wrong way to look at this. I don’t want you to make stupid mistakes and end up paying the consequences. What I mean is for you to try and do the right things, and even if you fail and do something wrong, not to regret it, because if you fix it, you will learn not to make that error again.

We all have amazingly awesome, incredibly spectacular memories. I can’t even begin to count all the inside-one-liner jokes my friends and I have. It’s so great to make memories. It’s so great to have fun and be with the people you love. And I won’t ever regret those moments, when we couldn’t breathe we were laughing so hard, or when we stayed up till five in the morning talking and never running out of subjects. Those times sure are memorable. And those people are even more memorable, and I will never regret meeting them or making them my friends, however brief a time they are in my life.

I believe with my full being that we should never regret the decisions we make, not even if they’re wrong. I know at first you might think that’s incorrect, but I can’t help but think that everything happens in our life for a reason. God has a plan, even if we have no idea what it is. And every understood bad decision is a step towards a better life. (I know that sounds like a cheesy self-help book, but it’s about as simple and real as I can get.) The key word in that last sentence is understood. Only when we really understand the hurt we’ve caused or the pain we feel can we learn and move on.

So there you have it; my little philosophy. Live your life so that you will remember all the things that made you who you are and never regret those decisions, even if they hurt, because if you trust in God and truly try to do what is right, then everything you do will be for His glory.

I hope I covered all I wanted to say....if I remember anything else, I'll write it in another post :)

Veggietales got it right when they said: “God made you special, and He loves you very much!”

Have a happy, prosperous, memorable 2012, everyone!