Have you ever regretted something, and the more you thought about it the more you found yourself saying, “If only”? Maybe it was something you said, or something you did, or a decision you made, but whatever it was left you with regret and the reverberation of “if only.”
We all have those “if only” regrets. They sound something like this:
We just put our Christmas decorations up…five days before Christmas! No, we’re not Scrooges and no, this is not typical for us.
We were going to have the decorations up three weeks before Christmas, but that week turned out to be more demanding than we expected. (Don’t they all?) We did stick a naked tree in a stand that week, but that’s as far as we got. Then my wife got sick a few days after that and has been sick ever since. So all we had was a naked tree in a stand five days before Christmas.
Some of the best marriage advice I’ve ever received came from Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. (For those who don’t know, The Grateful Dead is a psychedelic rock band that came to fame in the midst of the drug culture of the 60’s.) In Garcia’s self-titled 1972 solo album, a song entitled “Deal” contained the following lyric…
“Since it costs a lot to win, and even more to lose, you and me got to spend some time wondering what to choose.”
When you apply this line to marriage, it’s some of the best advice you’ll find, because it reminds us…
It was a normal evening, and I had no idea what was about to happen. My daughter was playing on the floor in the living room and I was helping my wife get dinner on the table. I had just put a bake potato on a plate when suddenly it happened.