Piloting Faith: Recognizing the gift of regrets...

A Word for the Day...
I am just discovering the beautiful work of Jan Richardson, an artist, writer, and minister in the United Methodist Church. Below is an excerpt from one of her books that I particularly loved. I hope you enjoy.
- Cameron
Recently it struck me that I have lived long enough to have some sense of the consequences of the choices I have made. I can look back and see the grace of the good choices. I can recognize the grief that has come in the choices that were less wise. I am not a woman of many regrets, and so it came as a surprise when I found myself visited by grief over decisions that were wise at the time but yet held sorrow. Closed doors cracked themselves open, beckoning me to see what I didn't have the eyes to notice at the time.
I have learned to understand regrets as invitations, as messengers. Rather than being thugs from the past, come to beat me up for decisions I cannot possibly retrieve, they come instead with the word to offer. The word often speaks of something missing in my life, some connection I need to make. With time and with giving attention to the regrets, they have become not so much about loss as about what is yet possible. What path can I still make from the choices gone before?
That you may welcome your regrets
not as sorrows
but as messengers, as invitations,
as doorways to what yet lies ahead.
- By Jan L. Richardson, author of In the Sanctuary of Women

Prayer for the Week
Meditate on these words of affirmation:
Hear the Good News! God has loved you, loves you now and will always love you. This is the good news which brings us new life. Thanks be to God.