I sometimes feel as if I have wasted most of my life.
I say sometimes because I have much to be thankful for. But some days I look at what others my age have accomplished and feel I could have done better. I wish I had worked harder at the things I thought mattered. I can spend a while thinking about the man I might have become.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a jazz musician. I don’t know where that desire came from – probably my father’s records. I heard someone playing the piano and wanted to play like that. I just knew I loved it. I took piano lessons and became quite good.
Then I discovered rock and roll – easier to play, with money and attention to be had without being particularly accomplished.
Goodbye, jazz.
I played rock and roll, made a living at it, and had a little local fame. Local, but fame is fame. Somewhere along the way, the piano player I had wanted to become got left behind.
I still love jazz, but sometimes listening to it hurts – I hear someone play and wish I had stayed with it, and I feel the loss all over again.
My father was a physician and wanted me to follow him into medicine. I can picture that whole life: medical school, joining his practice, taking over when he retired. It looks secure enough from where I’m sitting.
But I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to be a jazz musician.
Today, I am neither.
I don’t actually know how either life would have turned out. The imagined life had few complications; the real one had plenty.
God’s decisions and my choices
Perhaps you do this too – the education you didn’t finish, the opportunity you let pass, the work you meant to do – until you have weighed your whole life against one possibility and found it wanting.
I believe God is sovereign over my life. If He had wanted me to become a jazz musician, I would have become one, and there is some comfort in that. God knew my life before I was born — my desires, my decisions, where they would lead. None of it surprised Him. I ought to rest in that, though the regret keeps coming back.
But I can take that reasoning too far. Believing my life is under God’s rule does not mean every decision pleased Him. I am still responsible for my choices – I can acknowledge His sovereignty, admit I have been foolish, and still have something to repent of. Philippians 2:12b and 13 teach us to: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” These two verses sit side by side: God’s work doesn’t cancel my choices; it’s the reason I have any to make. I cannot explain how it all fits together, but I should be careful about using what I don’t understand to declare that nothing I do – or have done – matters.
There was a time I believed the Lord was calling me into pastoral ministry, and my pastor helped me find a path forward. I attended an Assemblies of God Bible school, graduated, and served two years as an associate pastor.
Then my wife became ill. I left the ministry to care for her.
I never returned to a pastoral position.
It isn’t what I’ve done
I sometimes put that beside the other things I didn’t become – the musician, the pastor, the physician too, though that one’s different. Nobody took medicine away from me; I just never wanted it enough to start.
But caring for my wife does not belong on a list of failures.
She was ill. She needed me. I went home.
I don’t say that to sound noble. She’s my wife. Nobody pins a medal on you for that.
When I count that decision as failure, I remember the position I left and overlook the person I went home to care for. And those two years serving the church belong in the account too – the work mattered while I was doing it, and leaving the position did not erase those years.
You may have left things out of your own account. Years caring for someone can look like years when you got nothing done. A job kept for the family’s sake can seem like a missed opportunity. And if illness changed what you could do, you may still be judging yourself by what you could do before.
We can be very thorough when we count our disappointments. We ought to give the rest of our lives the same attention.
That doesn’t require pretending every year was well spent. Some regrets have something to teach me; some choices I could have made more wisely. There may be things I need to confess, or something I can still put right.
But becoming a famous musician was never a commandment, and neither was joining my father’s medical practice. I need to distinguish between having sinned and having failed to become the man I imagined – those are not the same thing, though I have spent too many afternoons treating them like they are. Otherwise I can spend the rest of my life asking forgiveness for not having a more impressive life, and God never asked me for one.
And where I have sinned, I need to remember what God has said. Romans 8:1 promises: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
That promise rests on what Christ has done. I can face my failures honestly, because my standing with God doesn’t depend on proving I made excellent use of every opportunity.
I need His forgiveness, and I need to accept it. Rehearsing the same failures will never add anything to what Christ has already done for me.
Thankful and hurting
My life today has plenty of ordinary blessings. My wife and I have a house – with a mortgage I won’t live long enough to pay off, so we’re essentially renting the house we own. We have food, clothes, transportation, a good church. I have medicine when I need it. And there’s a dog snoring contentedly on the sofa next to me.
The dog seems satisfied with how things turned out.
I am grateful, and I still feel regret sometimes. Both can be true in the same afternoon – I can appreciate what the Lord has given me and still feel sorrow over something I have lost.
I don’t have to hide that from Him.
1 Peter 5:7, in the ESV: casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.
He cares for the person bringing the burden. I can come to Him with old questions and disappointments I feel foolish admitting – thankful and hurting. He already knows.
These feelings will probably visit me again. But when they do, I want to remember my disappointment gives me only part of the story – the people I have loved, the responsibilities I have carried, the mercies I have received. All of that belongs in the account.
And there is still life ahead of me.
Ephesians 2:8 through 10 reads:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
I didn’t earn any of that, and I won’t earn my way out of regret either. He already prepared the work I’m supposed to be doing today, whatever that is. I can trust Him with the years behind me and give my attention to the people and responsibilities in front of me.
I still have a keyboard connected to my computer and play occasionally. Sometimes I think about learning jazz again, but I talk myself out of it before I sit down. At my age, it seems a little late to start.
Still, I love the music. Learning even a little of it would give me pleasure, and I could be content with that. I could sit down at the keyboard and find out.
You may have something you keep putting off too – a skill, a person, a need at church. We can do those things without requiring them to make up for every missed opportunity. They are worth doing now.
Some opportunities are gone; some things we cannot go back and do. But the people who need us today deserve more than the attention left over after we finish regretting yesterday.
I want to love my wife, pray for my family, be useful to my church, and spend a little more time at that keyboard.
There is a life here now, and I want to give it more attention than the life I keep imagining.
Steve Febbaro is an 80-year-old member of a PCA congregation in Virginia Beach, Virginia.