The RSVP I Haven't Sent for My Twenty-Year Reunion
The RSVP I Haven't Sent for My Twenty-Year Reunion
RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 23, 2026
The invitation has been sitting on the counter for two weeks now, next to the mail I actually open. Twenty years since my high school class walked across that gym floor, and somewhere in the planning committee's spreadsheet is a list of names with little notes beside them, who became a doctor, who runs the family dealership now, who moved to Nashville and got a song on the radio once. I know because a classmate posted the highlight reel in our group chat, unprompted, proud of all of it, and I sat there scrolling with my thumb doing the same quiet math it always does when I let it. Ten of those twenty years, I was not building anything. I was surviving a version of myself I do not like remembering, and there is no clever way to make that stretch of time sound like it produced anything worth putting next to a dealership or a record deal.
Regret has a particular kind of gravity that grief and guilt do not quite have. Guilt says I did something wrong and can be forgiven for it. Regret sits somewhere colder, doing arithmetic on a life I cannot get back, running the counterfactual of who I might be now if those years had gone differently. I do not drink anymore. I have not for a long time. But sobriety did not hand me back the decade it cost me, and some nights that unopened invitation feels less like a party I am dreading and more like a deadline for admitting how far behind I let myself fall.
I have started to notice that this particular ache does not respond to the usual remedies. I cannot reason my way out of missing years the way I can reason my way out of a bad mood. The math is simply true. What I have needed instead is a different way of looking at the true thing, and Scripture keeps handing me one I did not expect. Joseph told his brothers, the same men who sold him into slavery and cost him years he never got to choose, something that still stops me every time I read it. "But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive" (Genesis 50:20, NKJV). He does not pretend the evil was not real, or that the lost years in that pit and that prison did not actually happen. He simply says God was working underneath the loss the whole time, toward an end Joseph could not have seen from inside it.
God made an even more specific promise to a nation that had watched a locust swarm strip their fields bare, years of harvest gone in an afternoon. "So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, The crawling locust, The consuming locust, And the chewing locust, My great army which I sent among you" (Joel 2:25, NKJV). Restore is not the same as explain. He does not tell them why the locusts came. He promises to give back what they ate, which is a different kind of comfort than an answer would have been, one aimed at the years themselves rather than my understanding of them.
Solomon looked at the whole shape of a human life and refused to rank the seasons the way I keep ranking mine. "To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1, NKJV). I have spent years treating my lost decade as a subtraction from the timeline everyone else got to keep, as if it existed outside the purpose the rest of my life was moving toward. Solomon will not let me file it there. Every season counts toward the whole, even the ones I would erase if erasing were an option, which it never actually is.
This is where my own effort runs out of road completely, because regret is a backward-facing ache, and I cannot will myself into facing forward by sheer determination. Paul named the only posture he had found that actually worked. "Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14, NKJV). Forgetting is not the same as pretending. Paul had a past worth regretting too, men he had persecuted, years he could never get back either. He describes reaching forward as a discipline of the Spirit, not a trick of the memory.
That is the whole difference between managing regret and actually being freed from its grip. Paul told Titus plainly where that freedom originates. God "saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit" (Titus 3:5, NKJV). Not by my own effort finally outweighing the lost years on some private ledger. Renewed, from outside myself, by a Spirit who does not audit the years the way I do. And Paul's larger promise still holds even over a decade I would call wasted. "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28, NKJV). That peace does not arrive because the math finally adds up in my favor. It arrives while the math is still what it is, guarding a heart my own accounting could never settle.
I think I am going to send that RSVP this week. Not because I have made peace with the ten years, exactly, but because I no longer believe they get the final word on what God is doing with the rest of my life. "To console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes" (Isaiah 61:3, NKJV) was written for exactly this kind of trade, a life He is still willing to build something beautiful out of, ashes and all. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which years you keep subtracting from your own story. He has a plan for you that was never canceled by the ones the locusts took, and He will never leave you to do that math alone.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Genesis 50:20; Joel 2:25; Ecclesiastes 3:1; Philippians 3:13-14; Titus 3:5; Romans 8:28; Isaiah 61:3.
RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 23, 2026
The invitation has been sitting on the counter for two weeks now, next to the mail I actually open. Twenty years since my high school class walked across that gym floor, and somewhere in the planning committee's spreadsheet is a list of names with little notes beside them, who became a doctor, who runs the family dealership now, who moved to Nashville and got a song on the radio once. I know because a classmate posted the highlight reel in our group chat, unprompted, proud of all of it, and I sat there scrolling with my thumb doing the same quiet math it always does when I let it. Ten of those twenty years, I was not building anything. I was surviving a version of myself I do not like remembering, and there is no clever way to make that stretch of time sound like it produced anything worth putting next to a dealership or a record deal.
Regret has a particular kind of gravity that grief and guilt do not quite have. Guilt says I did something wrong and can be forgiven for it. Regret sits somewhere colder, doing arithmetic on a life I cannot get back, running the counterfactual of who I might be now if those years had gone differently. I do not drink anymore. I have not for a long time. But sobriety did not hand me back the decade it cost me, and some nights that unopened invitation feels less like a party I am dreading and more like a deadline for admitting how far behind I let myself fall.
I have started to notice that this particular ache does not respond to the usual remedies. I cannot reason my way out of missing years the way I can reason my way out of a bad mood. The math is simply true. What I have needed instead is a different way of looking at the true thing, and Scripture keeps handing me one I did not expect. Joseph told his brothers, the same men who sold him into slavery and cost him years he never got to choose, something that still stops me every time I read it. "But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive" (Genesis 50:20, NKJV). He does not pretend the evil was not real, or that the lost years in that pit and that prison did not actually happen. He simply says God was working underneath the loss the whole time, toward an end Joseph could not have seen from inside it.
God made an even more specific promise to a nation that had watched a locust swarm strip their fields bare, years of harvest gone in an afternoon. "So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, The crawling locust, The consuming locust, And the chewing locust, My great army which I sent among you" (Joel 2:25, NKJV). Restore is not the same as explain. He does not tell them why the locusts came. He promises to give back what they ate, which is a different kind of comfort than an answer would have been, one aimed at the years themselves rather than my understanding of them.
Solomon looked at the whole shape of a human life and refused to rank the seasons the way I keep ranking mine. "To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1, NKJV). I have spent years treating my lost decade as a subtraction from the timeline everyone else got to keep, as if it existed outside the purpose the rest of my life was moving toward. Solomon will not let me file it there. Every season counts toward the whole, even the ones I would erase if erasing were an option, which it never actually is.
This is where my own effort runs out of road completely, because regret is a backward-facing ache, and I cannot will myself into facing forward by sheer determination. Paul named the only posture he had found that actually worked. "Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14, NKJV). Forgetting is not the same as pretending. Paul had a past worth regretting too, men he had persecuted, years he could never get back either. He describes reaching forward as a discipline of the Spirit, not a trick of the memory.
That is the whole difference between managing regret and actually being freed from its grip. Paul told Titus plainly where that freedom originates. God "saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit" (Titus 3:5, NKJV). Not by my own effort finally outweighing the lost years on some private ledger. Renewed, from outside myself, by a Spirit who does not audit the years the way I do. And Paul's larger promise still holds even over a decade I would call wasted. "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28, NKJV). That peace does not arrive because the math finally adds up in my favor. It arrives while the math is still what it is, guarding a heart my own accounting could never settle.
I think I am going to send that RSVP this week. Not because I have made peace with the ten years, exactly, but because I no longer believe they get the final word on what God is doing with the rest of my life. "To console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes" (Isaiah 61:3, NKJV) was written for exactly this kind of trade, a life He is still willing to build something beautiful out of, ashes and all. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which years you keep subtracting from your own story. He has a plan for you that was never canceled by the ones the locusts took, and He will never leave you to do that math alone.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Genesis 50:20; Joel 2:25; Ecclesiastes 3:1; Philippians 3:13-14; Titus 3:5; Romans 8:28; Isaiah 61:3.
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