Between Regret and Gratitude – Sunday, December 26, 1954
Christmas has come and gone again, and its closeness leads us to the question: Could we somehow keep the spirit that made yesterday so different a day—for different it was, and well we know it. Could we somehow avoid repeating the cycle the poet suggested:
“We ring the bells and we raise the strain
We hang up garlands everywhere,
And bid the tapers twinkle fair,
And feast and frolic—and then we go
Back to the same old lives again.”1
And now as to this week in which we close another year, another cycle of seasons: This week is one of winding up, one of looking two ways at once, one almost feeling two ways at once, as we move between regret and gratitude: regret for what we should have done and didn’t do; regret that so much more of life has come and gone—but gratitude that we have lived through yet another year, gratitude for the lengthening of our lives, and that there is yet time for doing some of what we should be doing; gratitude for much that hasn’t happened, that many of our fears haven’t taken tangible form; gratitude for faith in the future.
Perhaps regret could be the dominating impulse of us all if we would let it because no one of us has turned in a perfect performance—of that we can be certainly sure.
But whatever we have done or left undone, we must not live our lives in looking back. Not forgetting lessons learned, yet we must turn around and face the future, using what truth, what facts we have, and living by faith where fuller facts are not as yet in evidence.
The fact is that we have come through yet another year with faith; have come through, if not with perfect peace, at least with comparative peace. And still we have the sweet assurance, to quote the words of Robert Millikan, that “the Creator is still on the job”2.
And so, we close the old and face the new with faith. And as we face “the never ending flight of future days”, our gratitude may overshadow our regret, if we present honest repentance for the past, and trusting, working faith for the future, as time moves on into the endless reaches of eternity—for He who made us in His image is mindful of us all, and will lead us, with our willingness, to peace and progress, as God moves His eternal purposes “in His majesty and power”3.
1Susan Coolidge.
2Milton, Paradise Lost.
3D.& C. 88”47.
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December 26, 1954
Broadcast Number 1,323