"Regrets I've Had a Few"

In honor of death week, a tradition of most Memphians who remember the week Elvis Pressley died, I immersed myself in Elvis music. One of my favorites is when the king sings, “Regrets I’ve had a few, then again to few to mention.” (For the purest out there, I know Frank Sinatra recorded it first.) Irony seems to dance through these words when we consider the circumstances surround Elvis’ death. It did however spark my conscious to think about the regrets I have in my own life. Regrets are weird crazy things. They are situations in our life that if we could magically do over again, we would do differently. Regrets are different than failures. Regrets are not situations that we do not go into without much thought, we think them through, we pray about them, we move forward but in retrospect looking back we would have chosen something different. Regrets are not all bad, wrong, immoral, illegal, or unchristian. I regret I ate the whole pizza; I should have stopped at three pieces. Regrets are just situations in life, if we had to do all over again, we would try something different. I regret not spending more time with my loved one before they died. We have all had moments when we have said something to someone and we regretted it the moment it came out of our mouths. We all have regrets in our life. Some of us have a few, to few to mention, and some of us have too many to list. The thing about regrets is that in the precise moment, the decision, the action seems like the right action to take, but looking back we are not so sure.


As we continue our Batter Up! Sermon series while preparing the message of  looking at the Home Run Swing, I discovered how regrets keep us from hitting the homerun. We all love the home run ball. Hitting a homerun is hard to do but some players seem to do it with ease and make it look easy. In life we look at other people’s life and it seems they have the homerun swing. Everything seems to go their way; their job, marriages, house, kids, relationships, and other things we sort of envy. We begin to compare thier life to ours and more regrets begin to mount up. We look at them and say, “Man I wish I was that lucky.” Like homerun hitting and life; luck might not play any part in their success. When you watch a homerun hitter, they seem to do it with ease. What we don’t see is the preparation, experience, confidence, and wisdom the homerun hitters have. We see the ball go over the fences, the crowd cheer, and the fireworks explode and we forget the hours in the batting cage, watching video, weight training, and what the hitter has learned from the million of times at bat. If our life is full or regrets, to stop repeating them, we may have to explore new questions we need to ask ourselves. We need to learn, practice, and dedicate ourelves to when we are in similuar situations we make more wise desicisons. We might need to ask ourselves: What did we learn from our past? What is the most wise thing to do for our present circumstances? What is the best decision for our hope and dreams for the future? Answering theses questions before we act, may help us all reduce the regrets in our life..
Take care of yourself and one another,
Peace & Grace,
Tommy