Tags
17 Again, Regret, Reset, Rick Warren, Time Travel, Zac Efron
I doubt I would ever survive if I never get to get this off my chest before I sleep…
Given the chance, would you choose to relive your life all over again?
I just watched 17 again. Yes. But before you guys gasped in disbelief, roll on floor laughing, please know that it was NOT for Zac Efron. I just have this weakness for shows that deal with time travel. May it be The Butterfly Effect, The Secret, Paycheck, Kate & Leopold and even Click, I just can’t help but feel compelled to watch all of them.
Perhaps I am simply curious with how the protagonist would handle it… maybe sometimes, I find myself wanting to be the protagonist.
Often, we wish ourselves into that situation. We hope that we would have another chance to do life all over again, but to do it right this time! However, I have come to realized that we would never lead perfect lives. Given the chance for resets, even infinite reset would not suffice! We would always mess up simply because we are imperfect.
Learn to appreciate imperfections; you would be living with them for a lifetime!
If you believe the same God as I believe, grasp the concept of His sovereignty as hard as I do and trust in His goodness as much as I can… then you might realize that His permissible plans for us have been the best alternatives we could achieved with our flawed and misjudged choices. I do not regret any of my mistakes, although I do repent from all of them. It was these very mistakes and failures that God used to mold me into the person I am today. Given the choice now, I would choose to live it exactly the same way as I had. To ask for the removal of this mistakes would be to ask God for a different person; someone other than me.
Before the movie, I might have chosen otherwise….
If any of you collect cards, you would know that it’s the flawed cards that makes it valuable. Their value is in their imperfections. Ours is in God’s perfecting blood. Even angels do not have such a privilege!
So then, what about those who have “sinned greatly” in the world’s eyes? What about the pregnant teenager, the single mum or the drunken man who just killed someone while driving? Big mistakes were made, lives have been altered in a dramatic way. Surely these people would have a legitimate claim for a life reset!
Yet in life, if we cannot choose the hand we are dealt with, then we must choose the way we play the cards. I love how Rick Warren puts it across beautifully in “The Purpose Driven Life”. God uses our greatest pain to be your greatest ministry. No one can better minister to people with such pains other than those who have experienced it themselves. If you can overcome the pain with God, your greatest ministry would be to aid these people to overcome it.
And no one can do it better but you.
Of course all of the above are easier said than done, but I believe it all begins with a step. And that step is not another reset of the past, but the decisive setting of the future.