Regrets?

I've had a great e-mail conversation with a student over the past couple of days. She voiced concern about something I said at the beginning of the year in a talk--that InterVarsity is a community of students who are living our college careers to the fullest and finishing out with no regrets. She opined that in a world full of sin (and a room full of sinners) regret is inevitable.

While I agree that sin is inevitable, the good news for her and for me and for all of us is that sin does not have the last word. Had Christ not been raised from the dead then sin and death and regret have the last word. But Christ has risen, the tomb is empty, victory is secured, death has been conquered. Sin does not have the last word. Neither does regret. Forgiveness does. Life does. Love does. Hope wins.

And so in a world full of regrets, Christians are invited to live differently. Reconciliation has the last word. And so we can move confidently not because we're so put together, but because we live in the light and the power of the empty tomb.

The trick here, as in so many other places in our lives, is that we think that what we do or experience is "real" and forgiveness, like so many other religious-sounding words, is only hypothetical, theoretical.

But the good news is that quite the opposite is true. What we do is mostly shifting shadows, a mist that happens and vanishes. This is conflictingly disheartening and a tremendous relief. Sin is barely real. The real thing, the most real thing, is forgiveness. When all is said and done, all our sin will be done away with forever. And redemption and forgiveness will reach all the way back to the very first sin and again-make, reconcile, restore, heal, redeem every single sin of the children of God.

May be we'll be given the opportunity to look back over our lives, to see the silly and petty and foolish sins that so often plagued us. And maybe we will look back with a mixture of bemusement, sadness, and deep and utter relief that the rock-solid story of forgiveness and redemption and healing is the thing that is eternally true. Not our sin. Forgiveness. Grace.

And so all Christians everywhere are invited to live a life of no regrets. What a glorious invitation!