Mistakes I've Made

It sounds easy enough to learn from your mistakes. You blunder, shake your head and snigger sheepishly at your own stupidity, chalk it up to experience and move on – sadder but wiser. It’s a neat trick, and it works well enough when you’re just looking to lose the training wheels, build a birdhouse, or get a driver’s license.

But some mistakes aren’t that cut and dry. Sometimes, your mistakes aren’t just strike one - they’re game over. And there’s nothing to be learned really – no lesson to take home. Nothing to be done. Thanks for playing.

Those mistakes aren’t learning experiences. They’re iron gates around your heart, and, for the rest of your life, every good thing has to find a way around it to get in. They’re deep pits, padlocks – foxes that roam your vineyards, torches on their tails. You’re no better for these mistakes. Only more broken.

So. Here we are. I’ve got a pile of mistakes, and I don’t know what to do with them. And you, you probably have a few yourself. There’s no cashing these in for a better deal – no tokens to redeem for a second chance. There’s just the looking back, pinching the bridge of your nose between knuckles, and “if only.”

It’s the prayer that God doesn’t answer – the do-over. “You reap what you sow,” Jesus informed us, and I say those are terrible words. Because I’ve sown enough trouble in my time; when harvest season rolls around, it may not be an altogether pretty bounty.

But, this too, is God – God, who made things solid, and firm, and cut sharp corners on reality. Life is not stream-of-consciousness, or cyclical (whatever they may say.) There’s math at work – you reap what you sow. Sow desertion and reap abandonment. Sow jealousy and reap obsession. Sow trouble. Reap trouble. A river of blood and frogs falling from the skies. A tomb just shy of the Promised Land. Or David, in his tent, crying, “O Absalom! My son, my son!”

They are terrible words, but God is good to do this to us: to set up parameters around life, establish some rules, no matter how flimsy or how many exceptions. Mistakes don’t all bloom into daisies, not if you’re sowing thistles. God is good as His word. Maybe I spoke wrong at first – there is always something to be learned from mistakes, even if it’s just this:

Though every man be found a liar, still you would be found true.