Jaci Velasquez's When God Rescripts Your LifeSample

Do you have a season in your life that feels like it was just wasted years? Are you in one right now? Time that could have been so much more fruitful, so much better, if you just hadn’t blown it on running, hiding, whatever your particular issue? Or maybe it’s nothing that you did, it’s just the way life worked out, the person you loved walked out, the dream job went south. It’s so easy to focus on regret when you’ve got that kind of season in your history or in your today. And when we focus on regret, it can paralyze us from moving forward. . . .

Listen. God can repurpose your remorse. I can’t promise that the romance with the one that got away will circle back. I can’t promise that the job opportunity you walked away from will open back up. I can’t promise that you’ll be able to fix the relationship with that friend that ended in a blaze of thunderbolts of misunderstanding and anger.

But what I do know is that when we take the walk of repentance, God can rescript our “too late” into “never too late.” His ability to renew and recover isn’t dependent on our human timetable.

Now hear me good, girl. When I say the walk of repentance, I’m not talking about that walk of shame. I’m not talking about a walk down to the front of the church at the end of a church service. I’m talking about a walk of repentance in which we own our part of the mess of what seems like wasted years, even if it’s simply that we didn’t take the chance or we chose the wrong person to be in relationship with. I’m talking about cultivating the lessons from that time. There can be fruit even in a season of drought. That can sound counterintuitive, but there really can be fruit there. Okay, maybe more like root vegetables. Things that are good for you but maybe don’t taste as good and sweet as fruit. Like beets. Good for you. Nutritional. But you may have to dig for them. You will probably get dirty. You’ll get grime under your nails, and you’ll wonder if the nutrition of that spiritual veggie is worth the feel on your teeth.

And it is. It is.