Let Me Tell You About Regret

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(Anonymous)

Ever since I can remember I wanted to be two things in this world, a daddy and a husband. Profession, I don’t know maybe cowboy, maybe lawyer, maybe an astronaut. But I have always been sure of one thing, I want a family.

If you asked me when I was 12 when I would be married I would tell you 18 years old. You would laugh and I would laugh too and say I was kidding, but I wouldn’t be deep down. Everyone I know places an age on love. That has always been weird to me. I don’t know why I would ever do life alone if I could do it with “the one whom my soul loveth.” That’s just me though, I see that.

Here is the thing about regret. If I was perfect, I wouldn’t have any of it.

I think about a road. It has its many branches that veer into very separate paths. There may be a right path and a wrong path. Then again, there may be just as likely a bunch of paths that are rather indifferent.

Sometimes I wonder not whether I chose that wrong path, because I do think there is one out there. Sometimes I just wonder if I chose one of those indifferent paths that lead me to something not exactly “wrong” just not exactly “right.”

I look at the choices I have made that have led me to be the 22 year old I am (and I know you laugh because I am still so young, and I will laugh too, but I won’t be laughing deep down). I think about that beautiful girl that I told goodbye. I pray about her, for her, because of her. I dream of her, at least twice a week.

And maybe I wouldn’t regret the night she cried, then hit me, then kissed me for the last time, if I knew I was on the right path.

See, I can’t be sure and that is what makes letting go so damn hard. If I knew, if I really knew, it was for the best, I would smile and be her friend and be happy that she has found someone else.
But I wonder, in the bright of day as much as the dark of night, if I made the right choice or if I took a different path, the wrong one or equally worse an indifferent one.

Don’t get me wrong, I will be ok. I am young, I know. I am strong, I am smart (most of the time), I have things to offer.
But I am not perfect. And that’s ok. Sure, it’s ok. But what if one of those imperfections took over that night. What if, when I turned the car around to go back to her, and then swung it back around because I knew it would never be the same, I made the wrong choice or just some other choice neither good nor bad?

I don’t know about you but I am a God person. Its ok if you aren’t, I still think we have all thought about these things in some way or another, regardless of what we believe. (And by the way this is a pretty universal struggle. It doesn’t just have to be about love. You might be thinking, “Should I have kept up with that sport?” “Should I have applied for that job?”)

But He makes sense to me. I’ve asked him many days to take the burden of loving her away from me. I don’t want to love someone whose heart isn’t theirs to give. I’ve begged him to send her back to me. And sometimes I wonder if he does, only for me to choose another path and unawares I uncross them once again.
I lean on two things.

1) I am alive

2) God keeps building roads.

I don’t know if I will ever hold her again. I don’t know if He saved me for someone else, someone I am meant for. I don’t know what roads I’ve chosen nor will choose, good, bad, indifferent.
But I know, one day, I will see a woman walking down the aisle toward me, every eye on her, and I will say “that is the road meant for you and me.”

It will be a road of uncertainty, and mistakes, of questions, and more years than I would have predicted. But it will be our road to look back on, to share, to wind through, blissfully unaware of what could have been had we taken all the others. It will be our road and that will be enough.

Let me tell you about hope…

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Let Me Tell You About Regret

(Anonymous)

And maybe I wouldn’t regret the night she cried, then hit me, then kissed me for the last time, if I knew I was on the right path.

1) I am alive

2) God keeps building roads.

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