Go the Right Way – April 30, 2000
In a 1964 professional football game against the San Francisco Forty-Niners, Minnesota Viking Jim Marshall picked up a fumble and ran sixty yards for a touchdown. After tossing the ball through the air in triumphant delight, he was congratulated by a member of the opposing team. It was then that he realized he’d made a very big mistake. He ran the wrong way!1
Once in a while we all make mistakes that take us the wrong way. Mistakes that we make unwittingly, like the one made by Jim Marshall, may represent a temporary loss of direction followed by embarrassment, but we can usually recover quickly. Hurtful mistakes we make willfully can have a more lasting negative effect and lead us down the road of regret. Even after we’re pardoned by others, we’re so aware of our own misdeeds that it’s often very difficult to forgive ourselves. But if we neglect to do so, our progress is hindered and the resulting anguish may linger for years.
One such unresolved mistake haunted the great English writer Samuel Johnson. As a young man, he once refused to help his father sell books in the marketplace. “Pride was the source of that refusal,” he confessed, “and the remembrance of it was painful.”2 After his father died, Johnson couldn’t forgive himself for disobeying his father and bringing him grief. Decades later, in an effort to make peace with himself, he stood with his hat off in the rain for a considerable time on the very spot where his father used to sell books.
Guilt is a good teacher. But once a lesson is learned, guilt is no longer helpful. A life of unnecessary punishment is the wrong way to happiness—much better to be gentle with ourselves and just let it go, as we would with a good friend. We all make mistakes, yet our basic goodness remains unbroken. A bright future invites the brave to release the poison of self-hatred today. But sadly, many allow self-criticism to dominate their thoughts. Seeing reminders of failure everywhere they turn, chains them to the past. Squirming in their own quicksand, they sink lower with every move until finally in desperation they must reach for an outside hand.
Whenever the inability to forgive ourselves crushes our will and robs us of hope, a Divine power above our own is available. Driven to our knees, we can draw closer to the voice that promises, “I have heard thy prayer. I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee.’”3 With profound relief and peaceful reassurance, we get up and dust ourselves off. We look forward to a new life without staring back at the old. Our conscience again clear, and recovering our sense of direction, we go the right way.
Program #3689
1. See Henry Fankhauser, The Wacky World of Sports, (South Brunswick and New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., Inc., 1968), 109-111.
2. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1799), 612.
3. II Kings 20:5.