As 2022 Ends and 2023 Starts, Embrace Regret.

“Regret is a tough but fair teacher. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life.” --Brené Brown, author, "Rising Strong"

“Take a mulligan.” Ever heard that curious turn of phrase?

To explain: in golf to “take a mulligan” is wonderful and graceful, and also completely unofficial and illegal, but still adopted by some weekend hackers like me. A duffer who can’t consistently hit that little white ball straight and far or drop it in the hole dependably.

Thus, the mulligan…so once every golf round, taking a mulligan allows you to take back one shot, one errant drive, one regretful swing and then do it all over again. That’s right. Make a mistake but the golf gods grant you one more try, and so you do just that. Try again.

Take a mulligan.

You hit into the woods, that ball never to be found again, except maybe by Bambi. You swing at your ball buried in the sand trap, miss completely, sand and swears flying up into the air. You try to magically curve your golf ball around a tree. The ball hits the tree, ricochets, and whizzes by your head with inches to spare. 

AAAHHHHH! I can’t believe I just did that!!!! &*(^%$#@!!!!!!!

But then you get to take a mulligan. Take a do over. Start from scratch and not look back. I might regret my shot, sure, but then I can swing again. In forty-seven years of golf, I’ve shot thousands of regretful shots. Times I felt awful as soon as I swung the club and knew things would not turn out as I planned or hoped for.

Which, when you think about it, is also pretty much par for the course in our human lives too. And yes, I meant to use that pun.

We swing and sometimes we hit it beautifully but sometimes we swing, and we miss it, and we whiff. We plan on a brilliant outcome and instead life screws up, and sometimes really, really badly, the best laid plans going off into the woods. We think we have a simple shot, an easy task, but then we choke. Get nervous. Hesitate. Change our minds. Things just fail.

We have regrets. The times we wish we could do it all over. Take a life mulligan.

At each years’ end I look back at how I lived in the past 365 days. Along with the good, I also remember how I made mistakes, like in 2022. I recall the people who I hurt, by omission or commission, not meaning to. But there it is. A word spoken in anger. A commitment fallen short. An important day forgotten. I remember when I really botched it up at work. Said I would do something and then I did not. I recall the times I did not treat my body well or just gave myself a brutal time, would not let up in self-criticism. I think of days when I should have loved more boldly, yet I held back. There are phone calls I did not make. The risks I did not take.

In other words, life.

Sound familiar? It should. Because we all swing, and we all miss sometimes and that is just the way this life works out. None of us are perfect. None of us get to play God even though we might want to. No one escapes failures or knows a life devoid of regret.  To be alive is to both soar and to stumble, to sin and to succeed. It’s what makes life both an adventure and a struggle and everything in between.

So, here is my earnest prayer for all of us as we cross the bridge from 2022 into 2023.  When you look back on the year about to conclude and remember the things you wish you’d done differently and the regrets you are now wrestling with, do this.

Give yourself a mulligan. Give yourself some graceful love.  Accept your humanity. Embrace this life and embrace yourself as fully human, someone who swings and hits and someone who swings and misses.

The gift of faith is that God consistently gives us mulligans. Again and again and again. God made our humanity and never expects us to be divine somehow. Divinity is God’s job, and certainly not ours’.  Nope. We are designed to be both beautiful and flawed and all at the same time. And when we know this about ourselves, it makes it easier to accept and forgive others too. Give them a mulligan.

I, for one, cannot wait to welcome in a brand-new year. 2022 was good, at times even great and yes, at other times it was kind of hard, even a slog. That’s life.

In the year ahead may we all swing away and all with our best efforts and intentions. And when we make a mistake (and we will!), just take a mulligan. God is ready to give us one too.

Now where did that golf ball go?! 

Happy 2023. 

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.