The Great Do-over

Have you ever had one of those moments in life where you screwed something up so badly, you wish you could go back and try again?  Me too.

When I was in college in Tennessee, I met a wonderful girl and we hit it off instantly.  And by "hit it off," I mean we playfully avoided one another out of fear of rejection.  Eventually we got over that and started dating and I realized that this was the girl I wanted to marry.  So I started saving for a ring and decided that the fall of next year is when I would make make the big ask.  I started planning on how I would ask her.  Keep in mind, I was kind of a sap.  I was the dude who wrote poetry (really crappy poetry) for his girlfriends, and was the very definition of a pseudo-romantic.  I had the perfect plan laid out that would knock her socks off.

On a beautiful fall day, we headed to the Smoky Mountains to go rock-hopping.  Incidentally, that's exactly what it sounds like and, looking back, about as boring as it sounds too.  My plan was to hide the ring in my pocket, hop rocks to the middle of a stream, get on one knee and pop the question.  Presumably, this was going to coincide with a light from heaven and a chorus of angels.  Have you ever had an instance where fantasy and reality are about 1000 miles apart?  

I had the ring in the trunk of my car.  When we parked at the area where we would go out into the stream, I got into the trunk to get the ring.  While I was doing that, my fiance was getting something out of the front of the car.  Here's where I panicked.  I had this horrible feeling that I was going to fall into the stream and the ring was going to fall out and be lost.  So as I'm holding the ring and contemplating what I'm going to do, my wife walks to the back of the car.  In a moment of panic, I'm holding the ring and I look at her and say, "Um, will you?"  Her response?  "I'm going to throw up" (apparently this meant yes because we've been married for almost eleven years).   

Did I mention that this all took place next to a bathroom?  I am Don Juan, Casanova, and George Clooney all rolled into one.  

Isn't life like that?  I would love to be able to go back and try again, but what's done is done.  Life is a series of good decisions and bad decisions.  In my favorite movie, The Big Lebowski, a guy asks the main character, "How you doing, dude?"  To which Lebowski responds, "Well, you know, strikes and gutters, ups and downs."  That about sums it up for me.

While we can't go back to the past, what if I told you we had a clean slate anyway?  Jesus went to great pains to show people that God was a God of infinite grace.  After my proposing debacle, my wife spent the rest of the day saying, "It's OK honey, I said yes and I will always love you," as I moped around, wallowing in my idiocy.  Grace is a lot like that.  We mess up.  All of us.  We've all brought a little bit of hell to our own lives or the lives of others by our words and actions.  In those times, God looks down and says, "It's OK, I still say yes to you.  Move on and try again."  To use a golfing analogy, he's given us an infinite number of Mulligans as we find new and creative ways to shank our ball into the woods.  Every time, we get the opportunity to line up again, put the ball on the tee, and swing for the green.  

God is a God of second chances.  He doesn't hate you.  He doesn't dislike you.  He isn't disappointed in you.  He wants you to have life to the full, and he will give you an infinite amount of chances to find it.