and now that i have your interest...
millie came home from school with a story about a girl she sat next to yesterday. seems that this girl had a LARGE tattoo around her neck and millie asked what it said. because one time i told her it was a great conversation starter to ask someone what their tattoo meant. you can learn a lot about a person by what they choose to permanently put on their body. you can learn a lot about how stupid we humans are... and how we don’t understand how gravity and age will affect our body parts... but i digress.
the girl said that it was a quote and it said, “you will always regret the things that you have lost.” and so millie asked what it meant. little sweet innocent millie. because the minute that mills told me what the girl’s tattoo said, i knew what it meant.
and i bet most of you know too. a teenage girl. a load of regret. enough to make her scar her body in a way when every time she looks in the mirror she sees that mistake right there around her neck.
and the girl told millie what it meant. she regretted a physical relationship with a boy. those weren’t the words she used. but this is a family blog.
and i told millie how amazing it was that this girl was honest enough to admit that she regretted that. because we like to lie to ourselves about our regrets. about our guilt. we blame it on others... we justify it... we make it all sound fun and dandy so that we lead others to maybe join us in our boat full o’ mistakes. or we hide the things we regret. so deep that they cut us on the inside and then we hide the bleeding and cover it up with a ton of invisible band aids...
this girl wasn’t doing that. but what she had done was not the right choice in dealing with regrets either.
and i was telling my friend, dina, about this whole conversation because dina’s daughter is in a public high school too and dina is a year ahead of me in this venture. and this is what dina told me to tell millie....
and this is why i love dina so much. and why i call her with these dilemmas...
she said to tell millie that the beauty of life in Christ is that we don’t have to wear the tattoos of our shame and regret on our bodies. that we have another place to put our regrets. into His hands...
which reminded me of these verses.
Isaiah 53:4-6
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered Him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted.
But He was pierced for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by His wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 49:16
See, I have engraved (cut in, inscribed, marked, portrayed, printed)
you on the palms of My hands; your walls are ever before me.
see, don’t you want to be her friend too? so you can hear things like that on a tuesday morning...
He has engraved our regrets on His hands. and carried them to the cross. and there they remain. we have no need to see them every time that we look in the mirror. and we don’t need to tattoo them on our body. He has the scars. let Him carry them.