Article October 11, 1982 Issue

Ending the "what ifs"

ELIZABETH BICE LUERSSEN

On the heels of a difficult experience, after lessons learned more slowly than we might have wished, there often comes a flood of regret, self-reproach, and vain conjecture: such thoughts as "What if I had said this?" or "What if I had done that?" A young friend of mine calls such ruminating the "what ifs." Permitting such struggles to go on is mesmeric, disheartening, and pointless. More important, it is a denial of reality.

Regretfully reliving scenes of yesterday, after we have corrected what we can, is like trying to rearrange a dream instead of awaking from that dream. Existence is spiritual, not material; and in God's universe all is now as He would have it. In the infinite, divine perfection there is nothing to change or correct, nothing to revise or regret, for Spirit is All. Denying mortal existence as a dream of life in matter rather than merely regretting some phase of it helps one awake to divine reality. The nature of all evil is to draw us mesmerically to itself—to the material, mortal, and unreal—and one way evil seems to do this is through the "what ifs."

Sometimes an individual swims through a rough sea of troubles with strength and buoyancy only to be submerged later by an empty backwash of regret. The wave of suggestions that attempt to flood thought can be likened to the description in Revelation: "And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth."^{ Rev. 12:15, 16.}

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