When bad things happened, my tendency was to live in the past or think of a time when life would be different. Have you heard yourself say, “If I had only— If I had gone to college, taken a different job. If I had spent my money more wisely. If I had said no to the kids more. If I had worked less. If, if, if—” On the other hand, maybe you are the opposite, the one who constantly looks to the future. “I’ll be successful when I finish college, when I get a new job, when I meet Prince Charming, when I exercise more and eat healthier.” But for me the when never came, and the regret over the past kept me stuck. I was caught in a vicious loop of regret and dreams of how I wanted life to be. I fluctuated back and forth, stuck between the past and future, and never in the now, never where I was, but always where I wanted to be!

Can you relate to this? Do you have spinning conversations in your mind of what happened and keep thinking if only there had been a different outcome? Have you given up hope? Are you thinking that there is nothing that you can do, and have you accepted that this is it? Many of us think that something or someone will come along to make us happy and make life better. Now I can laugh at myself for thinking that my happiness was in the past or in the future. I can ignore the pressure from the media that says money, fancy cars, big homes, and the right jobs buy happiness. Frank Lloyd Wright, an American architect, writer, and educator, said, “Many wealthy people are little more than the janitors of their possessions.”¹ This is true, and yet we don’t realize it. We always want more. It is the way of the earthly world, but not God’s way. (pp. 7-8)