What do you say when someone asks you if you have any regrets? Some people will say no. I regret nothing, as Edith Piaf famously sang. But is it really true?
When someone asks you if you have any regrets, it feels like they are asking, “Will you tell us about your failures?” But I don’t really want to talk about my failures, do you?
Really, though, don’t you have some regrets?
If pressed for an answer, you may be tempted to turn it around and make it about someone else, such as, I regret that my kids haven’t turned out the way I wanted them to. Or I regret that the people I have tried to help have not been willing to accept that help. Making it all about someone else’s failures. Not helpful.
There is an organization called Failure Lab, which describes itself as being all about taking a deep dive into failure. Sound fun? They do a lot of different things now, but this is how they started. They would invite someone to get on stage before an audience and simply describe something they did that went wrong, some way they failed. They have to do it without any embellishments, without laying blame anywhere else, without telling the audience that it really turned out okay, and that they learned something valuable from the experience. They just have to lay the failure out there in all its fail-ish-ness.
It is uncomfortable for the speaker. It is perhaps even more uncomfortable for the audience. But people participate in it because it is surprisingly helpful. Acknowledging the failure in this way is surprisingly freeing.
We can see that the Apostle Paul knows that sense of freedom. He doesn’t even wait for someone to ask him about his regrets. He freely, even joyfully confesses his sins, his failures. He writes it down in these letters, he sends them out to all the churches he knows, he wants them to hear it: I was a total screw-up. An epic failure. And I write to you now as the foremost example of the Lord’s mercy and grace, patience and love. Not as someone who has surmounted his difficulties, but as a beneficiary of the grace of God.
Do you have any regrets? Could any one of us honestly say we have none? But how do you begin to confront them?
There are different ways. In our worship we confess our sin every week. When we do this, we are confessing on behalf of the church as a whole as well as ourselves personally. Sometimes it feels peculiar. People ask me sometimes why they should have to confess to something they didn’t ever do, and I say that we are confessing as the Church for the sins of the Church. But other times it feels extremely personal, and at those times you know it’s about you, intimately.
Yet some will say that the act of corporate confession, which is what we do, is not really enough, because each one of us needs to own up to our personal failures, by telling them to another person.
Don Miller wrote a book called Blue Like Jazz about his experience of being a Christian at a very secular university. It was a place that felt rather inhospitable to organized religion. An odd place to find a community of Christians, but he did. And this little group began to help one another grow in their faith, holding one another accountable, giving one another space to explore faith and doubts.
From their vantage point, they could see clearly many of the ways the church had failed. And so they decided to do something weird. They set up a confessional booth.
During the college’s annual festival, which was one big bacchanalian party, they decided they would set up a confessional booth. But it would be like this: they would not hear confessions, they would offer confessions. They would speak to the church’s failures to care for the hungry and the poor and the downtrodden, they would confess the church’s failure to be loving in the ways Jesus was loving; they would apologize for the crusades and for televangelists that take people’s money. They would confess to not representing Jesus well. They would make it personal.
Don describes what happened. A party-goer stumbled into the booth, in very high spirits, we might say. He sat down and grinned at Don, said his name is Jake. Jake says, “So what’s the deal, man? I’m supposed to confess to you all the juicy stuff I’ve been up to here?”
Don said, “Well, not exactly. Actually – our group – we want to confess to you. We were thinking about all the ways Christians have wronged people over time. You, know, the Crusades and stuff.”
Jake said, “Well, I doubt you were personally involved in any of that.” And Don said, “Right. But it’s just that, as followers of Jesus, we know we haven’t done a really good job of representing him and the things he stood for. We’ve failed at that.”
As Don was saying these things, Jake suddenly saw this was no game. It was serious to Don. Jake said, “You don’t have to do this.” Don said, “Yes, I do. Actually, in this moment I feel very strongly that I need to tell you how sorry I am for everything.”
And so he began. Confessing that he hadn’t done much to help the poor; that he had not loved his enemies, really, at all; that he had let his own personal agenda influence how he lived his faith. And when he finished, Jake had tears in his eyes and he said, “I forgive you.”
And so it went for the next couple of hours. One by one, party-goers would stumble into the booth not really knowing what to expect. And Don sat across from them and began again to confess the ways he had fallen short. And they listened. Many people wanted to hug him. They were all gracious and grateful.
As much as he had dreaded this beforehand, by the time it was done Don was a changed man. And he felt the ones who heard his confession were changed as well.
For the many young people who stepped into the booth, people who had perhaps been hurt by the church, who only saw the failures of the church, it was a healing experience. And for Don and the others who confessed truths that had previously been easy to ignore, they were, to their own surprise, changed by it.
For anyone who ever thought they had to get their life together first and then go to church,
For anyone who ever felt too embarrassed or ashamed to admit their failures, their regrets,
For anyone who ever believed they had to hide the crises of their family and personal life from the people who are supposed to love them most – their brothers and sisters in Christ,
Which is most of us,
Please hear this:
We are all broken. We are all failures in various ways. We are all full of regrets, every day if we are honest, and in need of love and care and support. We all need to be able to share our stories, as they are, unpolished and unfinished, with someone else who, we know, will still love us.
I said to you last week that anytime there is a barrier between you and a brother or sister in Christ there is a barrier between you and Christ. The same is true of our regrets. When we hold them inside, trying to hide them from the world, we are distancing ourselves from the community of Christ in the way we most need it.
If you are not inclined to confess your regrets to a bunch of total strangers – which I am most certainly not inclined to do – there is another option.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, believed that Christians all need a small group of fellow disciples, with whom they can feel trust and love, and with whom they can ask and answer: How is it with your soul?
If you take the step, find a group, learn to give and receive trust, perhaps you will find the value, the hope, in sharing your stories, as they are happening, to know the grace and mercy of God when you most need it.
We all know we are a work in progress. I don’t think any of us would say that we have reached perfection. We yearn to be better, in a word, in our secret hearts, but we will always have difficulty with that if we are not able to share our stories truthfully.
There is a reason this Christian life is set in community. Each of us is incomplete on our own; it is our communion with each other and Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that makes us complete.
Let this be your invitation for the week: is there someone you trust, someone who loves you? Perhaps this is someone to whom you can confess something that weighs on your spirit. Some way that you, personally, have fallen short. This is a good place to start.
And if you are ready for the next step, perhaps you would consider making a partnership, with someone, or a few, who can ask you, “How is it with your soul?” Someone to whom you would tell the truth.
When we bury our regrets deep inside, we remain trapped in our past. When we are honest about our condition, we will become free. And when we share it with others, fellow travelers on this journey of life, we might soar.
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