Where do you live? When someone asks this question, we may give a city, a state, or an actual street address. People live in apartments, condominiums, or houses, but regardless of what structure, they are known by an address. And yet, for a large number of people, though they have a physical address, they are confined in their minds in a place called “What If?”
The mind is a powerful thing. “What If” is a powerful place in the mind, where questions are continually processed. Day after day, week after week, month after month, and all too often, year after year, day and night, scenarios are played out in the mind, looking and wondering for different results. Trying to determine if a more agreeable outcome would have taken place, “if” you had made a different choice.
What if I had done this?
What if I had not done that?
What if I had turned left, instead of right?
What if I had left later?
What if I had sought help sooner?
What if I had chosen a different career?
What if I had not said that?
What if I had been raised in a different family?
What if I had not made that move?
What if someone had not hurt me?
And on, and on, and on it goes.
When life throws you a curve, it’s easy to move to “What If?” The death of someone dear to you, the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship, the challenges of parenting, or just the overwhelming struggles of everyday life. Living in a zone where you constantly are questioning yourself about a past event, or a past decision, and asking yourself, “What if?”
Nursing and rehearsing different outcomes, if you had only made a different decision, or choice. Processing, analyzing over and over and over again to try to arrive at a different destination. And yet, the longer you process it, and the more you ask, at some point you come to realize that you can never really truly know the answers to “What if?”
Trying to live in the past and trying to relive decisions that you’ve made is like an anchor that constantly pulls you back. You try to get on with your life, but you find yourself asking again, “What if I had made a different choice?”
Living in “What If?” is frustrating and stressful, and can be tormenting. Those who live in the past die in the present. Living in the past robs you of the opportunity to enjoy the present. Those moments, minutes, hours, days, months, and years that are spent trying to find another answer are lost, and another answer is never found.
If you are one of those who is living bound in “What If?” let me encourage you to step into the present. There is no rewind button on your life. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present. You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
God has an amazing way of rerouting us back to where we need to be, even though we may have missed a turn. You can’t be sure of where that road would have taken you. Trust in God’s ability to turn a wrong decision into a right destination.
Let me remind you, yesterday ended last night at midnight, and as the popular song in the movie “Frozen” goes, “Let It Go.”
Still Believing!
