The Gospel and Your Regrets

I don’t like being vulnerable.

This may surprise some of you. I know I haven’t written for a while, but if you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I seem to write some pretty vulnerable things—then send them to the inboxes of hundreds of people as soon as I hit Publish.

If I was an organized, selfless, emotionally available sort of writer, I might envision those hundreds of inboxes while I type these words. But I don’t. I don’t write to hundreds of people. I write to me. I write to empty journals, to dark rooms, to midnight hours, to drowsy coffee shops. I write to headphones drowning me with sliding cellos and limber piano keys, I write to mountains, to ocean, to silence. I write to me, at the times I feel most distant.

Some people write to be known by others. There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing to be read. But I write because I must. Nothing about me feels real or true unless I see it seeping in black ink across white paper.

I choose to share these articles because they end looking to a future that looks grim, but that promises victory. I know we all need repeated glimpses of that victory—past, here, still to come—and the only way it makes sense is through brokenness, and the only brokenness I know, that I have words for, is my brokenness. So that’s what I share. Maybe someone with a similar brokenness will resonate with my words. If no one does, that’s okay. I needed to write it anyway.

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Today is the two year anniversary of Isaiah going to be with Jesus. In college and on my own for the first time, I’m living in a place where very few people know that I’ve lost a brother. In one sense, it’s a good thing. I can smile when people ask me how many siblings I have and say “two brothers, six sisters” without batting an eye, and no one will give me a long, meaningful glance because I still (and always will) include Isaiah.

I’m never introduced anymore as “the girl I was telling you about who lost her brother.” It’s no longer what people see when they look at me. I can, most of the time, skate through social interactions even on hard days, and no one knows what my hardest days are about. It’s both a strange isolation and a blessed relief.

When I woke up this morning, I was doing okay. I was happy even, which I wasn’t expecting to be. I made it in time for my 8 AM class and relished in the fact that it was the very last class before break. I went for a drive in the morning sun, listening to happy songs on the radio and scanning the golden-frost of the Idaho Palouse all the way up to the white-nipped mountains.

Then I got home and opened my phone and his picture was there on the screen, smiling, the goofy lopsided, closed-mouth grin I remember so well…and I just broke. Buckled over, shaking with sobs. And all I could say was: I miss you. I miss you.

And then I sat down to write. Because I had to.

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What haunts me most are the regrets. The sibling things that, had we grown up together, we would have laughed about years down the road. But I didn’t get the chance to grow up with him, and I feel like I never got to make things right.

I remember when Isaiah was in the hospital, I asked if I could speak to him alone, and I sobbed on his chest and tried to do it then – to make up for all the times I hadn’t said “I love you”, to give him enough hugs to fill the ones I’d never made, to hold his hand. I wish I had danced with him more. And I wanted to say I’m sorry. And it haunted me – still does – that I don’t know if he could hear me.

I don’t ever want to be the person I was back then. I don’t want to have the same relationship I did with my siblings, or have the same priorities, or the same dreams. I never again want to be the girl who didn’t know how much she loved her siblings until one of them died. At the same time, missing Isaiah has made a hole in my heart that won’t ever heal this side of Heaven. And it hurts so bad.

I want that chance again. I want him back. I want to walk through that door tomorrow when I get home and see his goofy smile and his glasses pushed up his nose and give him a hug – a real hug – and ruffle his hair and say “I love you”, and then do all the things a brother and sister are supposed to do, and grow up together, and go on adventures, and sing songs again in the car with the windows rolled down, and watch him fall in love with the girl that would change his mind about marriage and have kids and tell my kids stories and grow old.

I want the chance to live with him to the very fullest…the chance I never would have known to take if he hadn’t died. It’s so twisted and so wrong. I want him again being the sister I am now, and I never would have become who I am now if I hadn’t lost him. It’s the horrible, selfish, irony, I guess. I want the sanctification without the pain. I want to cling to Jesus without knowing what it’s like to have everything else ripped away. And it hurts.

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I’ve never shared my regrets with anyone. I can’t really sum them up. I have specific ones of course, but its more just a vague, gut-scraping hole that I wasn’t the big sister I should have been, the one that Isaiah wanted.

I told that – just that part – in tears, to someone this week. “Sydney,” he said. “That’s all taken care of.”

All this time, I keep thinking I need to forgive myself…or at least, that’s what people tell me. But I can’t. I don’t even want to. Part of me wants to stay haunted, to suffer, to punish myself for every single chance I gave up, to force my way through a barrage of regret just to stand up every day, because regret is the cost of underestimated love, and I love him, and want to show myself, and God, and Isaiah how very much I do, and how sorry I am for messing up.

But it’s not my job to forgive myself. None of my sins were against me, or even against Isaiah. All of my sins have been against God, and Christ took them all, and the weight crushed him so that it wouldn’t crush me. Wouldn’t crush my brother.

God knows. Isaiah knows. Everything I have ever wanted to say but couldn’t. Everything I have ever wanted to do but can’t. Everything I miss from my past, and my future. And Isaiah wouldn’t wish to be back again so that I could be a better sister. One day I will join him in glory, because I’m his sister twice.

I miss him every day. And extra on days like this one. And I will, despite my best prayers, probably always be haunted by regret. I think most of us are. So when regret settles over you like a sickening cloud, preach the Gospel to it.

It was real. The hurt is real. But in Christ, It is finished.

Soli Deo Gloria,