Starting Over: Your Life Beyond RegretsSample

Living Beyond Your Regrets You can live beyond regrets permanently. The starting-over process is not just a one-time fix, but rather a skill you can employ whenever you need it. When something goes wrong in life, you can recover your momentum quickly and keep moving forward. Living beyond regrets can become a way of life. To help you in this, you will need to make sure the starting-over process of the three R’s – Recognize, Release, Redeem – is fixed firmly in your mind. It begins when you recognize your regret and face it head-on, identifying it for what it is, making it out to be neither too big nor too small, and then interrogating it for what it can teach you. You’re not indulging sorrowful feelings. You’re gathering valuable feedback for the change that’s coming. The next step comes when you release your regret and experience forgiveness that can only be found in Jesus. If you have yet to find your way back to God, turning your life over to him is exactly what you need to do so that you will have the power to ask other people to forgive you, forgive others, ask God’s forgiveness, forgive God and the world, or forgive yourself. Holding on to regret is just too great a burden. Whatever it takes, let it go! The final step is to redeem your regret. This is something only God can do. You need to trust him and wait expectantly for him to act and bring victory out of what seems like a total loss. In the meantime, prepare yourself as best you can for how God may choose to bring about redemption. Just remember that God doesn’t always act in the way we expect – he acts beyond our expectations! By starting over, you can put your regrets behind you. They lose their power when they no longer pose obstacles to forward motion. That’s an amazing thing. How awesome it would be if those regrets could be erased entirely. That’s just what’s going to happen one day! For those who have found their way back to God, we’ve got a new existence coming. It’s an eternal life that knows no regret. Reflect: Whom do you know that is stuck in the “Sorry Cycle” of longing and regret? How could you let God work through you to help that person start over?