Starting Over: Your Life Beyond Regrets - Softcover

Ferguson, Dave; Ferguson, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1601426127 ISBN 13: 9781601426123

Publisher: Multnomah, 2018

Synopsis

I wish I had loved more.
I wish I had been smarter about money.
I wish I had thought about God more.
 
We all have regrets about the past. Many of them come from our attempts to fulfill unmet longings. Dave and Jon Ferguson call this back and forth between longing and regret the Sorry Cycle—and they want to help us escape it.
 
In Starting Over, Dave and Jon show us how to recognize specific regrets and then release them to God as we learn to see our regrets as opportunities to start over. Finally, we can see God redeem our regrets as he takes the worst things in our lives and uses them for a greater good. In this new edition, Dave and Jon provide an inspiring and never before published case study for achieving real life change. 
 
Your regrets don’t need to keep you from the joy God has for your life. As you apply the recognize-release-redeem process to your financial, relational, and personal regrets, you will find new freedom in living out your God-given dreams.

Fall in Love with Your Regrets
 
It sounds impossible. How can we learn to love our mistakes and failures? Instead, we go over and over them in our mind. Could they ever bring us—or anyone else—good?
 
Drawing from scientific research and biblical truths, Jon and Dave Ferguson give us tools to redeem our mistakes in five key areas: relationships, health, purpose, finances, and spirituality. Along the way, they teach us lifelong skills for getting unstuck when regret threatens to trap us again. We also learn how to help others escape the Sorry Cycle and experience the Starting Over Loop.
 
It is possible to learn to love our regrets because through them we see God at work. We see that our weakness does not limit what God can do. Whatever regret is trapping you in the Sorry Cycle, God is big enough to redeem it. What could you do with a life beyond regret?

About this title

About the Author

Dave Ferguson is founding and lead pastor of Chicago’s Community Christian Church, a multisite missional community considered one of the most influential churches in America. Dave is also the visionary for the international church-planting movement New-Thing and president of the Exponential Conference. Dave and his wife, Sue, have three children and live in Naperville, Illinois.
 
Jon Ferguson is founding and teaching pastor of Community Christian Church and movement leader for NewThing. He is currently helping to plant a Community campus in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. He and his wife, Lisa, have two children. Brothers Dave and Jon are the coauthors of several books, including Finding Your Way Back to God.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

It’s going to be okay.

Soon enough, we’ll have some bold things to say to you. But we want to start this book with a gentle, reassuring whisper. And what we want to whisper is this: It’s going to be okay.

If you’ve gone to the trouble to pick up (or download) this book called Starting Over: Your Life Beyond Regrets, then we’re pretty sure it’s because an incident, or a series of incidents, is weighing on you and you’re unhappy. Something went on in your past that hurts every time you think of it. The idea of starting over sounds incredibly desirable to you, but you’re not sure it’s possible in your case. And do you want to risk the possibility of more disappointment, more heartache?

If you’re feeling this way, we’re sorry. And we want you to know it’s going to be okay.

While you’re going through your painful regret experience, you’re far from alone. Researchers say that children as young as nine express regret. Everybody you know who is out of grade school with developed mental faculties has experienced regret and is probably experiencing some of it right now. Regret is an unavoidable consequence of living in this world.

Not surprisingly, the human race has learned a lesson or two about regret along the way. Sages have opined about it. Older generations have passed down wisdom to younger generations on this topic. Artists have produced arresting portrayals of regret. Psychologists have investigated it clinically. The Bible teaches about it directly and indirectly in countless ways.

And now we offer you Starting Over. Here, you’ll find a clear and practical synthesis of the most important truths that Scripture, science, and story can teach us about beginning again after we’ve made a mistake or something has gone wrong in our lives. If there’s a formula for returning the dawn to our lives, this is it.

The two of us are brothers, and we wrote every bit of this book together. But just so you know, starting with chapter 1, we’ll be writing from the perspective of “I,” referring to Dave. That’s merely for the sake of simplicity. Both of us are speaking to you all the way through.

We are pastors who have not only endured our own regrets, as you have, but have also listened to literally thousands of people tell us about their regrets. An old phrase describes pastors as those who have “the cure of souls” in their care. We have a God-given burden to help the members of our church find the cure for the aches within them. What we’ve learned from helping them to start over, and starting over ourselves, we now want to share with you via the pages of this book.

So right now we’re asking, trust us just a little. Enough to keep reading to see if we can teach you something that will help you start over. Ignore your fear, silence your doubt, and place a bet on the hope you have within you that maybe, just maybe, life can begin anew for you.

The fact is, starting over is not an out-of-reach dream.

It’s the way to live your life beyond regrets.
Chapter 1 - The Sorry Cycle
 
Check out these regrets anonymously posted online:
 
· I regret marrying my husband three weeks ago. I should have called it off before I walked down the aisle. I am twenty-three and just haven’t had the time to learn to love myself yet.
 
· My biggest regret, one that plagues me in my waking moments and some sleeping moments, is that when I was given the opportunity to go to USC for screenwriting I didn’t take the chance.
 
· I regret not telling people how he hurt me. Now, if he is hurting other people, it’s my fault.
 
This stuff is gut wrenching.
 
And oh so familiar.
 
Regret is a universal emotion. We all make wrong or foolish choices, or something or someone does something hurtful to us, and we regret it. Sometimes we even start regretting a decision before we make it—because we’re so sure the consequences are going to disappoint us!
 
Some people have bigger regrets or dwell on their regrets more than others do, but everybody has them. So don’t feel alone if you look back on some episodes of embarrassing boneheadedness or epic nastiness in your past and wish you could do it again differently.
 
I wrote this book to help you and many others deal with regrets and start over again. I wrote it for those of us who have ruined relationships, lost jobs, or failed when given golden opportunities. It is for us if we have spent a night in jail, rejected good advice, or hurt somebody we cared about. This is a book for all of us who have regrets of any type burdening our souls and aren’t sure how to face the future.
 
Truthfully, it’s for every one of us.
 
I bet your mind is already simmering with thoughts of your own regrets. They might be minor regrets that you can dismiss from your head whenever you want or major regrets that are painful and crippling and ever present to you. Maybe you even have a mega regret that you try to suppress beneath the surface of your consciousness. It feels like holding down an underwater volcano, doesn’t it? Exhausting.
 
Whatever the magnitude of your regret, and whatever the cause, I have a word of hope for you:
This is not the end. You don’t have to stay stuck in regret.
 
Diagnosis: Regret Paralysis
 
Let me tell you how I came to write this book. It started with an observation Jon and I made shortly after the release of our previous book, Finding Your Way Back to God.
 
In that book we described a series of five awakenings that people go through
if they feel they have become distant from God and are finding their way back.
 
1. Awakening to longing—“There’s got to be more.”
2. Awakening to regret—“I wish I could start over.”
3. Awakening to help—“I can’t do this on my own.”
4. Awakening to love—“God loves me deeply after all.”
5. Awakening to life—“Now this is living!”
 
In our conversations with people who had read the book, we were pleased
that what we had written resonated with so many people. But we noticed something curious: many of the people we talked to experienced the Awakening to Regret but then got stuck there.
 
For example, one woman in her midthirties told us, “I wish I could startover after my divorce—I
really do. But you have no idea how the breakup has affected the way I feel about myself. How lonely I am. What big financial trouble I’m in today. Not to mention the loss of my hopes for having children, which was my biggest dream. Honestly, I don’t really see God as caring about me or having anything much good left for me.”
 
Jon and I can’t remember which of us first coined the term, but somewhere
along the way we started using the phrase Sorry Cycle to describe what people
meant when they said things like this. They were sorry about what happened
and felt sorry for themselves, but they just couldn’t seem to get beyond that. Essentially
they were going from longing to regret, back to longing then regret, in
an endless cycle of repetition.
 
They were stuck in their regrets.
 
Paralyzed.
 
And miserable because of it.
 
Divorce, abuse, addiction, bankruptcy, the loss of dreams, and other experiences that people go through can be terrible. It’s easy to see why so many of us get trapped in sorrow and regret. But getting stuck like this only makes a situation worse. And so we have to be honest about what’s really happening here—we have to admit there’s a Sorry Cycle in operation.
 
Psychologists have a term for getting stuck in useless regret: rumination. Like a cow chewing its cud, we go over and over our regrets in our mind. That’s the Sorry Cycle, and it’s destructive. Clinical psychologist Melanie Greenberg, in an article called “The Psychology of Regret,” says:
 
Regret can have damaging effects on mind and body when it turns into fruitless rumination and self-blame that keeps people from re-engaging with life. This pattern of repetitive, negative, self-focused ruminative thinking is characteristic of depression and may be a cause of this mental health problem as well. . . . Regret can result in chronic stress, negatively affecting hormonal and immune system functioning. Regret impedes the ability to recover from stressful life events by extending their emotional
reach for months, years, or lifetimes.
 
Going round and round in the Sorry Cycle is harmful to our minds and bodies—and I would add our souls to that list too. Furthermore, as we function poorly, the people around us, including our spouses, kids, friends, and coworkers, are forced to deal with a severely damaged person. In a sense, we take them along with us for a ride in the Sorry Cycle.
 
Sometimes we think that if we try to ignore our regrets they’ll shrink over time—or better yet, go away. The opposite is true. Regrets tend to grow over time. And so do their costs. If I neglect my marriage for one month, for example, that is regrettable. But if I neglect it for ten years, the damage will be immeasurably greater.
 
And then there are the opportunity costs.
 
Can you imagine the benefits you aren’t enjoying because you haven’t gotten over the failure of your business venture, the rupture in your family, the humiliating public exposure of your immorality, or whatever else you’re ruminating about? What peace are you not experiencing? What sense of satisfaction in accomplishment are you missing out on? What connectedness with others are you doing without? What work of creativity are you not able to produce, or what service to the needy are you unequipped to provide? How might your relationship with God be more intimate?
 
If we don’t deal with the roots of our regrets, if we don’t make the choice to start over, the costs of what we’re missing out on can be enormous and will accrue exponentially over time. Yet sadly, the fact remains that many people, possibly including you, are spinning in the Sorry Cycle today. If left unchecked, anybody’s Sorry Cycle can turn into a downward spiral.
 
A Self-Made Failure Story
 
When I was in my twenties, I knew God was calling me to lead a church. I was desperate to learn how to do that to the best of my ability. And that’s why I latched on to Donald.
 
Donald was the genius behind one of the fastest-growing churches in the country. He wasn’t the upfront guy, but everyone close to him knew that he was the leader who put it all together and was responsible for seeing thousands of lives changed.
 
For that reason, I wrote to Donald and begged him to give me an internship. “I’ll do it for free,” I said. “I’ll get your coffee. Whatever. Just let me hang out with you!” That’s how much I wanted to have the opportunity to learn from Donald.
 
I was thrilled when he said yes to my plea, and I quickly packed my stuff and drove across the country.
 
The internship turned out to be all I had hoped for and more. Later, I would implement much of what I learned from Donald when I founded Community Christian Church.
 
I loved and admired my mentor Donald so much.
 
And that’s why I was both stunned and grieved a few years after my internship when I learned that Donald had basically chucked his whole life. 
 
Shockingly, in what seemed like a moment of utter recklessness, he left his wife of twenty years. His explanation was brief and shallow: “We were emotionally disconnected.” No doubt there was more to it than that, though I never learned any more details about the causes of the split (nor did I need to). But in any case this marriage was over and Donald’s relationship with his two teenage sons would never be the same.
 
In the midst of all this turmoil, Donald’s senior pastor also “suggested” that Donald should resign his ministry position. So that’s what he did, begrudgingly. And then, having moved into a small apartment, he lived almost as a recluse for a long time, until he finally got a job as a part-time
professor at a community college.
 
The man who had taught me the importance of relationships was terribly alone.
 
After hearing what had become of Donald, I called him. On the phone, I thanked him again for all he’d done for me, and he seemed to appreciate that. Then I asked him about how his life was going.
 
“Are you in touch with any of the old team back at the church?” I asked.
 
He said no. Then he went on to talk bitterly about the judgment he felt he’d received from some at the church. Eventually, though, he admitted that he had rejected them at least as much as they had rejected him.
 
“Have you tried to make amends with Barbara?” I asked.
 
Again, no. The tone of his voice said he wasn’t interested in trying to reconcile with his wife.
 
“What about the boys? What are you doing to restore your relationship with them?”
 
Here Donald got emotional. I could tell he was in anguish about being estranged from his children. “I’ve lost them forever,” he said.
 
“But have you tried to reconcile with them?” I persisted.
 
“I did at first, but there’s no point in trying anymore,” he said. “It’s too late.”
 
I hung up the phone that day feeling sad and more than a little confused. I still couldn’t understand how this guy whom God had used so powerfully could bail on his family and ministry. Nor could I understand why he was refusing to try to fix some of the mess he had created. He felt badly about what he’d done. But clearly, he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
 
He was stuck so firmly in the Sorry Cycle that he couldn’t even imagine a way out of it. And I’m sorry to say that nothing has really changed in the twenty years that have passed since then. As far as I know, Donald has never apologized, never made amends with anyone he hurt, and never truly pursued reconciliation with his family or old friends. He has continued to live a quiet and lonely life with regret seemingly his only companion.
 
This is what we cannot permit to happen in our lives! And we don’t have to. We don’t have to get stuck in a Sorry Cycle.
 
Are you with me?
 
Next, I want to help you start dealing with your own regrets more productively by helping you understand them better. You see, there are certain kinds of regrets that cause us to get stuck in the Sorry Cycle. There are three categories that are like giant buckets we can use to start sorting and making sense of our regrets.
 
Which Bucket Is Your Regret In?
 
Every regret is unique, and the sorrow we feel in response to our regrets is deeply personal to us. Yet I’ve observed that there are three jumbo categories that everybody’s regrets fall into. We fee...

Edition details

• Publisher: Multnomah
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1601426127
• ISBN 13: 9781601426123
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240