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Receptivity and offering: Sharing regrets with others

Lynne Baab • Thursday March 10 2022

As a young adult, I was curious what it meant that humans are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). I started asking older and wiser Christians what they thought, and the uniform answer was that humans are rational like God. In the decades since then, an idea has exploded on the theological scene that humans are social because the Trinity is relational. Many theologians now argue that the image of God in humans is our drive and need to nurture connections with other people and with God. The level of sociability from one person to another varies, of course. The pandemic...

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Receptivity and offering: Reframing regrets by separating thoughts from feelings

Lynne Baab • Thursday March 3 2022

I regret that a little more than a decade ago I neglected to respond to two – or maybe three – consecutive letters from a friend. We had been in-person friends as young adults, and she moved away. Our friendship became a letter-based friendship, and we had a pattern of writing long letters to each other. We normally waited a month or two to respond, and we had a good rhythm for two decades. In 2010, I had a mysterious health condition that made me unbelievably tired for many months. I neglected so many things, including answering this friend’s letters. (I...

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Receptivity and offering: Some options for reframing regrets

Lynne Baab • Friday February 25 2022

I regret that I disciplined my kids too harshly when they were toddlers and preschoolers. That regret has motivated me to be gentle with them as adults. I still grieve that harsh discipline, and I still sometimes feel shame about it, but I can now see that those regrets have made me a better mother of adult sons.

Before I wrote last week’s blog post about reframing regrets, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I have felt ashamed, but I hadn’t realized how deeply my regrets have shaped my behavior in good ways for the past two decades as my sons reached...

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Receptivity and offering: Reframing regrets

Lynne Baab • Saturday February 19 2022

I wrote last week about a fascinating book about regret by Daniel H. Pink. Here’s a summary of his argument, referencing academic research on regret and a survey of 16,000 people who responded online to his questions about regret:

“The conclusion from both the science and the survey is clear: Regret is not dangerous or abnormal. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Equally important, regret is valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.” [1] In last week’s post, I gave a longer summary of his main point.

Pink...

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