No Regrets

To my son,

                As we watched the parade this week we were all shocked and devasted to find out about Macie Hill who died in a tragic accident. We mourn for her and her family and pray that the Lord will strengthen and bless them in this very difficult time. This incident has caused me to reflect on the uncertainty of life itself—we just never know when the Lord might take someone home unexpectedly and when the last time we see someone might be. Amulek taught the Zoramites, “For behold, this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors” (Alma 34:32). Indeed, while it may seem when you are young that life is very long, the older I get the more I realize how fast it really goes and why it is just like “a day” as Amulek said. I don’t know how long my life or your life will be, but I do know that our time is short and we must treat each day as if it were our last by doing those things that are most important. As one of our hymns declares, “The time is far spent; there is little remaining.” We used to sing that hymn often as missionaries—I believe our mission president wanted to distill on our minds that we had very little time to serve and so we needed to do so with all our heart. As Samuel the Lamanite taught the wicked Nephites, he tried to help them see how they would feel if, while still doing their bad deeds, they were taken from this life: “But behold, your days of probation are past; ye have procrastinated the day of your salvation until it is everlastingly too late, and your destruction is made sure; yea, for ye have sought all the days of your lives for that which ye could not obtain; and ye have sought for happiness in doing iniquity, which thing is contrary to the nature of that righteousness which is in our great and Eternal Head” (Helaman 13:38). If we procrastinate repenting and doing those things that the Lord would have us do for too long, we may find that it becomes too late for us when “the day” that is this life has passed. And so I hope you and I can both strive to make use of every moment to do good and love those around us.

                A phrase that my friends and I said to each other as we parted our separate ways to serve missions was this: “No regrets.” We didn’t want to look back on our missions with regrets about how we had served or what we had done. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t make mistakes—I made plenty—but I wanted to go home knowing I had tried my best, worked as hard as I could, and served the Lord with all my heart. We really should try to live that way in life, especially in how we treat others. We never know when something we say to someone will be the last words they hear from us in mortality. How much regret would we have if we had spoken hurtful words as our last and we never had the chance in this life to apologize! Today is always the best day to love and forgive, to serve and show compassion, for tomorrow we may not have that opportunity. As President Monson once declared, “How fragile life, how certain death. We do not know when we will be required to leave this mortal existence. And so I ask, ‘What are we doing with today?’ If we live only for tomorrow, we’ll have a lot of empty yesterdays today. Have we been guilty of declaring, ‘I’ve been thinking about making some course corrections in my life. I plan to take the first step—tomorrow’? With such thinking, tomorrow is forever. Such tomorrows rarely come unless we do something about them today.”   

                In this same talk, President Monson told a powerful story about why we should not misuse our opportunities to love others today. A lady named Louise Rich wrote this story about her grandmother: “My grandmother had an enemy named Mrs. Wilcox. Grandma and Mrs. Wilcox moved, as brides, into next-door houses on the main street of the tiny town in which they were to live out their lives. I don’t know what started the war between them—and I don’t think that by the time I came along, over thirty years later, they themselves remembered what started it. This was no polite sparring match; this was total war…. When as children we visited my grandmother, part of the fun was making faces at Mrs. Wilcox’s grandchildren. One banner day we put a snake into the Wilcox rain barrel. My grandmother made token protests, but we sensed tacit sympathy. Don’t think for a minute that this was a one-sided campaign. Mrs. Wilcox had grandchildren, too. Grandma didn’t get off scot free. Never a windy washday went by that the clothesline didn’t mysteriously break, with the clothes falling in the dirt.” Louise continued, “I don’t know how Grandma could have borne her troubles so long if it hadn’t been for the household page of her daily Boston newspaper…. It had a department composed of letters from readers to each other. The idea was that if you had a problem—or even only some steam to blow off—you wrote a letter to the paper, signing some fancy name like Arbutus. That was Grandma’s pen name. Then some of the other ladies who had the same problem wrote back and told you what they had done about it, signing themselves One Who Knows or Xanthippe or whatever. Very often, the problem disposed of, you kept on for years writing to each other through the column of the paper…. That’s what happened to Grandma. She and a woman called Sea Gull corresponded for a quarter of a century. Sea Gull was Grandma’s true friend.” So this woman’s grandmother had a great enemy next door to whom she never showed any love but had found a great friend in an unknown pen pal through the newspaper for many years whom she loved and served.

    Eventually her grandmother’s enemy Mrs. Wilcox passed away, and Louise recounted, “In a small town, no matter how much you have hated your next-door neighbor, it is only common decency to run over and see what practical service you can do the bereaved. Grandma, neat in a percale apron to show that she meant what she said about being put to work, crossed the lawn to the Wilcox house, where the Wilcox daughters set her to cleaning the already-immaculate front parlor for the funeral. And there on the parlor table in the place of honor was a huge scrapbook; and in the scrapbook, pasted neatly in parallel columns were Grandma’s letters to Sea Gull over the years and Sea Gull’s letters to her. Though neither woman had known it, Grandma’s worst enemy had been her [very] best friend. That was the only time I remember seeing my grandmother cry. I didn’t know then exactly what she was crying about, but I do now. She was crying for all the wasted years which could never be salvaged.” Her bitter enemy and best friend had been the same person! That is a powerful reminder that we need to love others today. Let’s us not live with regrets when someone is taken from us and we realize, too late, that we cannot longer seek forgiveness or show kindness. Life is far too short for hatred or meanness or unkind words. I hope you will seek to treat people every day as if it will be the last time you see them, and then I’m confident you will have no major regrets. 

Love,

Dad