Imagine for a moment that they had not reconciled. How much worse would the deaths have been for David? He would have probably regretted it for the rest of his life. When have all either known or been those people, those weighed down by regret. How do we not end up in that place.
First, we must think before we speak or act. In Star Wars, Luke is told “Trust your feelings.” Christianity tells us just the opposite.
We know how powerful feelings are and how they can lead us astray. Instead we are told, “Trust your conscience.” Not only are we told to trust it, we are told that we must form it, constantly. In the way athletes train, we must constantly be imersing ourselves in the Word of God, and the teaching f the Church to help us understand the Word.
Secondly, we are at times going to fail, and fail badly. That failure is sometimes going to be accompanied by regret. And not all regret is bad. Some regret can be instructive. It can help us avoid falling again. But chronic, ongoing regret is not healthy.
Thankfully we have medicine for that. It’s called the Sacrament of Penance. It is the place we take our guilt, our shame, our regret, and we leave them all. We leave them in the loving and merciful hands of God. There we are washed clean.
