Shortcuts Make Long Delays

I had a dream last night which has started a rather reflective (and potentially depressing) thought process for a Palm Sunday.

In this dream, I was visiting someone I knew in grade school, someone that I have not seen for 25 years. Apparently, as part of my visit, we were reviewing a scrapbook he had made. His comment to me was "This is a look over the last 20 years of my life."

I woke up, but being that I had not slept well anyway, began to lay there in the early morning dark and began to make a mental comparison of the last 20 years. Let's see: 20 years ago (1988), I was in my second full semester at Humboldt State. My process of wandering had not started yet, but was about to accelerate.

Looking back over the intervening period of time was not much better. Yes, I know that 0430 is not the time to be thinking about anything of import (at least, not while you have had no sleep) because one magnifies the errors and minimizes the positives, but I am still hard pressed to explain all the things I did. In some cases, the errors of yesterday are finally being worked out and made right today (I'm a believer in the theory that in order to advance, you've first got to stop your direction, make a U-turn, and get back to point where you made the detour. Shortcuts across country to make up time lead to long delays.). But still, what might have been accomplished had those journeys which I took been replaced by things of greater worth (As Aslan says to a character in The Silver Chair in response to the question "May I know what would have happened if I obeyed?", "What would have happened? Child, no-one is ever permitted to to know that."

The good points and good impacts I've made are there as well, and I'm neither so foolish nor so arrogant to suppose that there are none. But I feel like Robert Murry McCheyne saying "Not a trait worth remembering! And yet these four and twenty hours must be accounted for." Time is going forward, not backwards - may the next 20 years leave me with less to regret and more to look forward to.