Day 24: Do you ever wish you could {revise} a chapter from your life?

“Remember not the former things,
    nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing;
    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
    and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:18-19 esv

{Revise} – make corrections, change, or edit. A do-over.

Who, if offered, wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to revise a particular moment in their life story? Don’t we all have regrets? Isn’t it so much easier to look back with hindsight and edit our choices? At some point in the game, don’t we all wish to call for a time-out to review the previous play hoping for an opportunity to replay the down?

I have plenty of scenarios to which my mind races when the “what if” monster comes to play with my emotions. If God were to give me the opportunity to go back and make edits in my life script, I feel sure I would be tempted to say yes. However, when regret threatens to hold me hostage over a past course of action, I remember a conversation I had with my paternal grandfather.

I was a youngster of 9 years or so and the conversation revolved around my parents’ choice to elope. It was the summer of 1961, they were young – 17 & 19 – in love and wanted to marry. Permission from my mom’s parents was granted, but not so for my dad’s parents – and so they made a life choice. It was a choice over which my grandfather was expressing his desire for them to wait – “Just two years”, he said.

My response to my grandfather was this, “But grandpa if they had waited two more years, you wouldn’t have us as your grandchildren.” His instant response was that we would simply be two years younger with a pat on my head. The conversation ending response came from my mouth, though I’ve often wondered if it was Holy Spirit teaching us both a lesson, “Grandpa, I don’t think it works like that.”

Today pondering “the rest of the story” of Ruth, Boaz and Naomi I wonder if anywhere in the ten plus years through the famine and back home to the return of the harvest season if Naomi wished she had made different choices. Did she hold regrets over leaving Bethlehem – she and her men? Was there a time along the way she wished her sons had not married Moabite women? I just wonder… did she ever wish for a do-over. “What if” God had placed an editor’s pen in her hand.

So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went into her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age, for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him.” Ruth 4:13-15

Simple, right? If Naomi were given the opportunity to go back and {revise} her story, this would not be the well-known redemptive love story in which so many of us delight, and from which much truth is gleaned.

God gave us the opportunity to live in perfection without regret in His beautiful garden called Eden. Because of a choice made by God’s created man and woman, we all now live with the temptation to regret, a desire to {revise} our own stories – to make our stories the one we wished we had.

Thankfully, our redemption doesn’t come through our own re-writes for who among us is able to know the mind of God or to see how the messy of our story magnifies His greatness and majesty. Grateful Lord, I am this morning, grateful, You know when and where and how we will walk out of the famine season and into the return of the harvest You have already planted for us.

Ponders:

I wonder – do you also have a story you are tempted to wish you could revise?
- Would you talk out the scenario with Jesus today? Will you honestly pour out your desire to revise your story?
- And will you listen for His response? Take note of Holy Spirit’s ideas about your story, how He sees you in the middle of your story and let Him teach you His way of redemption.
I am reminded this morning of Jesus’ words in Mark 2:22: “…And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.”
- This word reminds me God’s redemptive work in me is to fashion me as a new creation ready for Holy Spirit to take up residence in me. God is not so much about revising us as He is about creating new.
- Is there a need in your life to surrender your old wineskin and allow God to create you new? Would you like to cry out with King David, and me too, the life-giving words of Psalm 51?
  - “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me… Restore to me the JOY of Your salvation…”