Rewind Please

"Trust God from the bottom of your heart;
don't try to figure out everything on your own.
Listen for God's voice in everything you do, everywhere you go;
He's the one that will keep you on the right the track."
Proverbs 3:5-6 The Message

Ever wish that you could have a redo? That you could say to God, "Oops! My mistake. Could you kindly hit the rewind button? Let's do a take two."

In the movies, that is what they do. If you were the main charactor, you would have the chance to take as many retakes as it took to make the scene perfect. But in real life, that's not possible. We have one chance and one chance only. Whatever we make of the scene is what is recorded. There's really no do overs.

At the same time, we can't live in the world of regret. Oh, we can be sorry for what we did. We can learn from our mistake, but we shouldn't keep kicking ourselves forever. We can't let the joy of the Lord be stolen by the feelings of regret.

How do we keep the joy through the regret? We turn to the part of our verse that states, "trust God from the bottom of your heart; don't try to figure out everything on your own." You see, sometimes we think that we know a lot more than we really do. We think that we are in control of our own destiny--but we're not. There's no guarentee that if we did things differently, that our lives would have a different outcome.

What's guarenteed is that if we trust in our God, if we give Him our paths, if we don't try to micro-manage everything, if we, "Listen for God's voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; He's the one that will keep you on the right track.", the outcome will ultimately be what He had designed the scene to be in the very beginning.