“I wish I hadn’t done that!” “If only I’d known this!” “I’m really sorry I chose that way.”

Most of us have dealt with such thoughts. Ruminating about the past, even with deep regret, tends to immerse us in a mental fog that makes us feel separated from God. Backward-looking thoughts can prevent our progress and shouldn’t be coddled or ignored, no matter how familiar they’ve become. 

Sometimes I find it helpful to think of the story of Lot’s wife, who didn’t heed the warning not to look back at the destruction of her hometown of Sodom and became a “pillar of salt.” As a result, she missed the opportunity to move forward with her husband and daughters, who were led away by angels from the chaos to safety (see Gen., chap. 19). 

I have learned that God provides angel thoughts to lead each of us out of unwholesome or corrupt situations into places of harmony and security. To be aware of these guiding thoughts and to follow them, we must be willing to humbly let go of matter-bound habits of thought or outworn egotistical beliefs that prevent us from seeing God’s goodness.

Some years ago a healing alerted me to the fact that I need not accommodate painful feelings of regret over decisions I’d made earlier in my life. I’d had several physical healings in Christian Science, so when I found myself incapacitated with back pain, I turned to prayer as taught in Science and Health. In the first chapter, titled “Prayer,” Mary Baker Eddy counsels, “In the quiet sanctuary of earnest longings, we must deny sin and plead God’s allness” (p. 15). 

Thinking of God as all, I knew that He constantly communicates to us whatever we most need. As I mentally listened, it came to me that this extreme back pain could be described as a “pang.” Using an unabridged dictionary, I looked up pang and found one of the meanings given was “a feeling of piercing mental anguish.” One of the phrases used to illustrate the meaning was “a pang of remorse.” That made me review my thinking. Quickly, I saw that though I regretted some decisions I had made, I had done my best to put things right. I certainly didn’t want, nor need, to carry that heavy sense of self-reproach around anymore.

I turned my thought meekly to God as Mind, to know how to address the painful sense that I had made choices that had been hurtful to me. In this case, it came to me that God is ever present. Therefore God had been with me—loving, guarding, and guiding me—back then when those decisions had been made. There had never been a moment when God had not been there, nor a moment when I had not been reflecting His goodness. As God saw it, good had been the only fact of my being all along. There had never been an occasion when I had lapsed into evil or experienced harm. As a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes makes clear, “Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it” (3:14).

Gradually, with my persistent affirmation and realization of Love’s constant care for me, even in the past, I felt purified and free. The back pain left, and I could move easily again. I guess you could call this a healing of a “looking back pain.”

This is not to suggest that there are not occasions when we need to specifically acknowledge, repent of, and eradicate past sinful thoughts. If that is necessary, God provides us with the wisdom and the opportunity to make amends—to repent of (change thought about) whatever may have been present in consciousness that was unlike good. But God provides no time for the generation, activity, or proliferation of evil. In the teachings of Christian Science, we learn that God, divine Mind, keeps track only of the appearing of good. As Science and Health puts it, “The history of error is a dream-narrative” (p. 530), and, “. . . Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded” (p. 584).

When we awake, we see that error is unreal and that spiritual good is continuously unfolding. Past mistakes can teach valuable lessons, but they need to be seen as unable to disturb, scar, or drag us down. Prayer will lead us out of remorse and toward our natural status as God’s loved, joyful children. 

Letting go of what we have outgrown, we are ready to move forward with God’s angels—with no regrets.