Remorse

Do you have a deep, dark secret?

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” describes a man slowly going mad because of a dark secret. The narrator recounts a murder he has committed, of an old man with a filmy blue “vulture eye,” whose regard the murderer simply could not endure.

The narrator-killer hides the old man’s body under the floorboards of his house, but then he begins to hear the beating of the dead man’s heart beneath his feet. The sound—clearly a metaphor for the murderer’s tormenting shame and guilt—grows louder and louder. In the end, the narrator can stand the thumping no longer; seeking relief, he confesses his crime to the police.

Most, if not all, of us have guilty secrets, secrets we have never told anyone. Psychologists call the secrets we keep about ourselves “self-concealment.” Although what you self-conceal might feel uniquely shameful, the experience of carrying a guilty secret really doesn’t vary that much across the population. Michael Slepian, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia University, maintains a website called KeepingSecrets, which organizes into various categories the things that people are hiding from others. The most common secrets anonymously cataloged involve infidelity or indiscretion. In short: Your own tell-tale heart probably involves love and sex.

We all carry the memories of unspoken words and missed opportunities. The quiet echoes of regret and the whispered reminder that perfection is elusive and regret is a constant companion. So, it’s no surprise that a new poll finds that most Americans are concerned about the road not taken in their lives. And when it comes to regrets, people are more likely to dwell on things they didn’t do than the things they have done.

A survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, which found that only 11% of Americans don’t have any regrets. Among the regrets the majority of us have are the following:

Not speaking up (40%)

Not visiting family or friends enough (36%)

Not pursuing our dreams (35%)

The missed chances to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip

On the other hand, the top actions Americans regret doing include:

Spending money or purchasing something they later regret (49%)

Fighting with friends or family (43%)

Making an unnecessary comment (36%)

32% of baby boomers have a regret that spans three decades and still crosses their minds an average of three times per month. While the oldest regret millennials’ is only about 11 years-old, they fret about it on average almost once per week, more than any other generation.

Hosting friends and family from out of town always sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t come without its challenges. Two-thirds of Americans have told a guest to “make themselves at home” and regretted it later. That’s according to a new survey of 2,000 Americans, which found 72 percent have told a guest to make the space their own—and 91% of those have regretted it afterward.

Some of the reasons respondents have regretted allowing people to make themselves at home include guests expecting more meals than planned (54%), overstaying their welcome (45%), and making a mess (39%).

Results also looked to see who makes the worst guests, with friends (42%), siblings (39%), and in-laws (37%) topping the list. For a third of respondents (35%), the situation has become unpleasant enough that they’ve told someone they’re a “bad guest.”

On the flip side, 75% of Americans surveyed believe they’re a good host—with 31% of those saying they’re a “very good” host.

The survey also looked at the lengths that hosts go to, and the steps people can take to ensure their home is inviting. In order to be a good host, over four in 10 have purchased a new bed or new mattress for people to sleep on when they stay the night (49%) or purchased new furniture to ensure guests are comfortable (45%).

French atheist Guillaume Bignon grew up in a loving family in France. He did well in school and landed a job as a computer scientist in finance. He also excelled in sports, growing to be six feet four inches, and played volleyball in a national league, traveling the country every weekend for the games. All in all, he was happy with his life. The chances of ever hearing the gospel—let alone believing it—were incredibly slim.

While vacationing in the Caribbean he met an attractive young woman. She mentioned that she believed in God and believed that sex belonged in marriage. This was a problem to him, so his new goal in life was to disabuse his girlfriend of her beliefs which were standing in the way of sex. He started thinking: “What good reason was there to think God exists? But, if I was going to refute Christianity, I first needed to know what it claimed. So, I picked up a Bible.” He also prayed, “If there is a God, then here I am. Why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me? I’m open.”

A week or two after his unbelieving prayer, one of his shoulders started to fail, without any evident injury. The doctor couldn’t see anything wrong, but he was told that he needed to rest his shoulder and to stop playing volleyball for a couple of weeks.

Against my will, I was now off the courts. With my Sundays available, I decided I would go to a church to see what Christians do when they get together. I drove to an evangelical congregation in Paris, visiting it as I would a zoo: to see exotic animals that I had read about in books but had never seen in real life.

After the service he hurried to the exit door to avoid all contact with people and the pastor. But as he reached the door a chilling blast went up from his stomach to his throat. He heard himself saying: “This is ridiculous. I have to figure this out.” So, he closed the door, and went straight to the pastor. Bignon said, “So, you believe in God?” “Yes,” the pastor said, smiling. “So how does that work out?” I asked. “We can talk about it,” he said.

After most of the people left, they went to his office and spoke for hours. Bignon bombarded the pastor with questions, who patiently and intelligently explained his worldview. Bignon writes, “My unbelieving prayers shifted to, ‘God, if you are real, you need to make it clear so I can jump in and not make a fool of myself.’”

But instead of a light from heaven, God reactivated his conscience. He remembered a particularly sinister misdeed and God brought it back to his mind in full force. Bignon writes:

I was struck with an intense guilt, and disgusted at the thought of what I had done and the lies I had covered it with. All of a sudden, the quarter dropped. That is why Jesus had to die: Me. He took upon himself the penalty that I deserved, so that in God’s justice, my sins would be forgiven—by grace as a gift, rather than by my righteous deeds or religious rituals. He died so that I may live. I placed my trust in Jesus, and asked him to forgive me. This, in short, is how God takes a French atheist and makes a Christian theologian out of him.

Editor’s Note: Guillaume Bignon went on to obtain a master’s in New Testament studies. In the process, he met a wonderful woman, got married, had two children, and attained a PhD in philosophical theology.

As the American advertising slogan goes, milk “does a body good.” But for one real estate agent, his wallet might feel differently.

Canadian real estate agent Mike Rose was slapped with a substantial fine of 20,000 Canadian dollars (approximately $15,000 USD) by the British Columbia Financial Services Authority (BCFSA), for drinking milk in an unauthorized manner. The agency deemed Rose's behavior “unbecoming" and detrimental to public confidence in the real estate industry at large.

The incident occurred on the evening of a house showing in mid-July. Homeowner Lyska Fullerton and her family had prepared the house for one set of potential buyers. Later, Rose informed the Fullerton family of another showing. Unbeknownst to them, Rose had been caught on a Ring camera during that second showing, making a series of questionable decisions.

The surveillance footage showed Rose entering the house ahead of the scheduled buyers. He opened the kitchen blinds, proceeded to the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk, and took a drink directly from it. He then put the milk back in the fridge. As the potential buyers toured the house, Rose also sat on the couch, inadvertently breaking its arm in the process.

Fullerton said her concern wasn't about the milk itself, but the lack of transparency. "He didn't even leave a note or tell us this happened,” she said. “I had to find out because of my camera, and that's just gross and plain wrong,"

In a statement to a local news outlet, Rose apologized for his actions, describing them as "very unfortunate, and very uncharacteristic." He acknowledged his mistake and vowed not to repeat such behavior, promising to reflect on his actions in the coming weeks.

The incident has raised questions about professional conduct in the real estate sector and the expectations clients have for agents during property showings. It has also sparked a broader conversation about the responsibility of agents to uphold ethical standards and respect homeowners' spaces.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Whether we are in church leadership or business people in the community we must make sure that our behavior is exemplary at all times. Our actions reflect on ourselves and on our Christian testimony to the world.

According to Daniel Pink, writing in the Wall Street Journal, regret is the second most common emotion felt among human beings. Pink argues that regret isn’t just common, it’s actually beneficial:

For all its intuitive appeal, the “No Regrets” approach is an unsustainable blueprint for living. At a time like ours—when teenagers are battling unprecedented mental-health challenges, adults are gripped by doubt over their financial future, and the cloud of an enduring pandemic casts uncertainty over all of our decisions—it is especially counterproductive.

I have collected and analyzed more than 16,000 individual descriptions of regret from people in 105 countries. One of them was Abby Henderson, a 30-year-old, who wrote: “I regret not taking advantage of spending time with my grandparents as a child. I resented their presence in my home and their desire to connect with me, and now I’d do anything to get that time back.” Rather than shut out this regret or be hobbled by it, she altered her approach to her aging mother and father and began recording and compiling stories from their lives. “I don’t want to feel the way when my parents die that I felt about my grandparents of ‘What did I miss?’”

Regret feels awful. It is the stomach-churning sensation that the present would be better and the future brighter if only you hadn’t chosen so poorly, decided so wrongly or acted so stupidly in the past. Regret hurts.

Regret is not … 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.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Pink observes that love and regret are the two most common human emotions. Addressing loves and regrets by preaching a cruciform sermon will hit the lived experience of every person in the room, even if their hearts haven’t yet been broken open to a regretless salvation. When regret brings us to repentance and salvation, it is part of being forgiving and being set free from our past through God’s grace.

God blessed actor Matthew McConaughey and his wife, Camila Alves, with a little boy. As his son’s birthday approached, the star opened up about how the Bible inspired him to choose the name Levi.

Matthew is pretty outspoken about his Christian faith. But it wasn’t always that way. The star admits he drifted away from faith when he first became famous. He stopped going to church all together, caught up in life as a Hollywood superstar.

But Camila’s devotion to Christ reminded him of what really matters. He was inspired to return to his faith, and even had his favorite Bible verse (Matt. 6:22) engraved on his wedding band as a way of honoring the person who brought him back to Christ. “The light of the body is the eye; if then your eye is true, all your body will be full of light.”

That same verse played a huge role in Matthew’s life while he and Camila were expecting. The couple decided against finding out the gender of their baby. So, they had a list of seven names to choose from. He said, "Levi’s another name for Matthew in the Bible. We had talked about possibly Matthew, Jr. if he was a boy.”

But soon after the doctor announced to the couple they’d had a boy it became clear Levi was the perfect fit. After spending some time cuddling with their precious baby boy, the doctor handed them a card to fill out with the boy’s chosen name. Listed on the card was their son’s birth time—exactly 6:22pm. And with the time perfectly matching his favorite verse, the Bible inspired Matthew McConaughey to decide on Levi!

In a recent podcast interview with the Economist, actor Viggo Mortenson (he played Aragorn in Lord of the Rings) talked about his aging father who suffers from dementia. Mortenson’s father kept telling his caretakers about a seemingly strange incident from his childhood—the day when he forgot to close a pig pen.

Everyone thought the old man was spouting nonsense, until they discovered the truth behind the story. Apparently, when he was a boy during a time when food was scarce, he left the gate open, and the pigs got out and ransacked the family garden. He never admitted to his heedless mistake as a boy, but, clearly, his guilt had buried itself deep within his subconscious. Every secret, after all, is eventually brought to light.

Willie Carson, the famous British jockey, was racing one day at Pontefract. He was happily leading on the rails. A furlong and a half from home he thought he heard something at his back and, glancing round, he saw the shadow of a horse coming up behind. Determined that he should not be beaten, he spurred on and was first at the finish line. He looked round again and saw that the nearest horse was fifteen lengths behind--he had been racing his own shadow for the last part of the race.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes we are haunted by the memory of a mistake, a regret from our past. It is as if there is a shadow looming over us, preventing us from going forward. God has forgiven our past and calls us to move forward into his future (Phillipians 3:13).

Sir Everton Weekes, the legendary West Indian cricketer, stands out as one of the finest sportsmen to come out of the Caribbean. During a glittering career, Everton Weekes played in 48 Internationals and scored 4,455 runs as a batsman, at an average of 58.61. His average places him at number 10 on the all-time International Test averages in cricket history.

One strange statistic of his prolific skill, however, is that Sir Everton Weekes scored only one hit for “six” runs in his entire career. (A “six” is when a batsman hits the ball to clear the boundary rope without it bouncing inside the playing area).

When asked once about this strange statistic, Everton Weekes hinted that it was probably reflective of the time when as a child, he would play street cricket in the neighborhood with friends. He said, “If you hit the ball in the air and broke someone's window, you weren't getting that ball back, so we had to keep it on the ground.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Although in Sir Everton Weekes' case it never had a negative effect on career, sadly, many people allow past memories to hold them back from bringing out the best in them. If you are one of them, may Paul’s words encourage you. He said, “... But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14).

Who has been married the most times? King Henry VIII (six times), film star Elizabeth Taylor (eight times), and TV actress Zsa Zsa Gabor (nine times) would be top candidates. However, little-known Glynn “Scotty” Wolfe would easily claim the title of the world’s most married person by eclipsing all three combined.

Starting at age twenty-two, Wolfe married twenty-nine times. Some of the marriages ended in days, while other lasted years. What fueled his insatiable yearning to move on?

Those who have studied Wolfe from a psychological perspective suggest that as soon as he committed to a person, he experienced varying degrees of remorse. His marriage would experience bumps in the relational road, and he’d start looking for other options.

How did his life end? Though he reportedly fathered over forty children, and many of his ex-spouses were still living, he died alone and penniless. His lifeless body--with a tattoo of a tied knot on his forearm--went unclaimed in the county morgue for months.

For the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor, kindness is a discipline that is its own reward. But occasionally, their acts of kindness yield more tangible fruit.

The sisters operate a hospice called St. Martin’s Home, and were at a big box retailer purchasing Christmas gifts for the elderly residents and staff. While they wheeled their cart through the parking lot, they were approached by a stranger with an offer to help load the gifts into the trunk of their car.

“We just thought it was a good Samaritan and he was there out the willingness of his heart and the holiday spirit," said sister Caroline Joseph. Sister Bernadette made sure to thank him for his efforts.

“I said, 'Gee, you did that so quickly! I can't tell you how grateful we are that you helped us.' And I shook his hand and I said, 'God bless you, and I surely will pray for you.'"

The stranger moved fast for a reason; upon their return, the nuns opened the trunk and found half of their gifts missing. But before they could file a police report, a store rep called to report that their gifts were spotted in a cart on the far side of the parking lot. The sisters’ theory is that the thief was so moved by their words of gratitude that he couldn’t finish the job.

Potential Preaching Angles:

Kindness sincerely expressed can stir goodness in even those who intend evil. Repentance is not just regret, but changing our outward actions to match our inward change of heart.

Some high-profile men accused of sexual misconduct are moving on with their careers without admitting to wrongdoing. Louis C.K., Les Moonves, and Garrison Keillor are just a few of the men who were previously forced to resign from positions or projects because of allegations of sexual misconduct. They are now trying to resurrect their careers by casting themselves as the real victims of false accusation.

But there was a notable exception to this recovery without repentance theme. TV showrunner Dan Harmon, formerly of NBC’s Community. Harmon publicly apologized during a podcast for his unwanted advances and subsequent retaliation against writer Megan Ganz during her stint as a writer on his show. Harmon said he abused both Ganz and his position of power by sexually harassing her during the time she worked on the series.

A day after the podcast aired, Ganz called his apology “a master class in how to apologize.” She also stated on Twitter, “This was never about vengeance; it's about vindication. That's why it didn’t feel right to just accept his apology in private (although I did that, too). Because if any part of this process should be done in the light, it’s the forgiveness part. And so, @danharmon, I forgive you.”

Potential Preaching Angles:

How can we expect forgiveness without expressing repentance? When we continue doing wrong without asking forgiveness, we reject God’s heart, whose kindness toward us is for the purpose of leading us toward change.

The inventor of the World Wide Web is horrified by what has become of his creation, said Katrina Brooker in Vanity Fair. Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea for the web in 1989 while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. His greatest innovation was to give away the source code for free, letting anyone build their own applications using the technology.

“The spirit there was very decentralized,” Berners-Lee says. “The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to ask permission.” He shakes his head. “That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.”

Berners-Lee says that he’s disturbed by the way Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon have monopolized whole categories of online activity, and he’s aghast at the rampant spying by government agencies. The web, he says, has “failed instead of served humanity” and has become “anti-human.” Berners-Lee believes that everyone should demand better. “Enough is enough. Get out your Magic Marker and your signboard and your broomstick. And go out on the streets.”

Possible Preaching Angles: 1) Creator; Grief; Sorrow – While God never changes his mind (Numbers 23:19) he does grieve that mankind has deviated so completely from the beauty and freedom of his original design for creation. 2) Disappointment; Remorse; Regret - We also can have deep regret that our achievements or words can be misused or cause unforeseen harm to ourselves or others.

A trend continues to take place in the online world of anonymity. Several websites offer the opportunity to air one's darkest confessions. Visitors put into words the very thing they have spent a lifetime wanting no one to know about themselves. While visiting, they can also read the long-hidden confessions of others, and recognize a part of humanity that is often as obscured as their own secrets—namely, I am not the only one with a mask, a conflicted heart, a hidden skeleton. "Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart," one site reads. "If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world." Elsewhere, one of these sites made news when one of its anonymous users posted a cryptic message seemingly confessing to murder, catching the attention of Chicago Police.

Possible Preaching Angles: Jill Carattini adds: "The invitation to emerge from our darkest failings, lies, and secrets is not an invitation to dwell in our own impoverishment but rather a summons to light, reconciliation, community, and true humanity. The unique message of Jesus is that there is no reason to hide. Before we came up with plans to improve our images or learned to pretend with masks and swap for better identities, he saw who we were and was determined to approach regardless. Before we found a way to conceal our many failings or even weighed the possibilities of unlocking our darkest secrets, God came near and called us out of obscurity by name."

A study has found that the average person is holding onto 13 secrets, five of which they've never told a living soul. And it's not the secret itself that will haunt you—it's all the mental energy you spend thinking about it. New research shows that some people actually feel physically heavier when they're burdened with a secret, and that extra "weight" can skew how you navigate your surroundings.

When participants were asked to judge the slope of a hill or the length of a distance, those who were preoccupied with keeping secrets judged the hills as steeper and the distances longer than they really were. Michael Slepian, a professor at the Columbia Business School told The Atlantic, "We found that when people were thinking about their secrets, they actually acted as if they were burdened by physical weight."

Slepian and his team examined 13,000 real life secrets to figure out what people are keeping secrets about, what it's like to have a secret, and why secret-keeping has overwhelmingly been viewed as a negative human experience. These secrets involved things like telling a lie, harming someone, drug use, theft, violating someone's trust, sexual infidelity, or a secret hobby.

The team then asked the participants how often their minds wandered to think about those secrets in the past month, and how often they found themselves in situations that forced them to actively conceal these secrets. Secrets were far more likely to come to the fore when people were alone with their thoughts than in social situations. In other words, we spend way more mental energy mulling over our secrets on our own time than actively trying to conceal them.

Possible Preaching Angles: 1) Burden; Guilt; Secrets - This research agrees with the Bible that unconfessed sin is a tangible "burden of guilt too heavy to bear" (Psalm 38:4); 2) Confession; Forgiveness - How blessed is the relief that comes as confession and forgiveness lift the weight from the soul.

In a New York Times article, columnist David Brooks argues, "Religion my be in retreat, but guilt seems as powerfully present as ever." To make his point, Brooks quotes from a brilliant essay by Wlfred McClay called "The Strange Persistence of Guilt." Brooks writes:

Technology gives us power and power entails responsibility, and responsibility, McClay notes, leads to guilt: You and I see a picture of a starving child in Sudan and we know inwardly that we're not doing enough. "Whatever donation I make to a charitable organization, it can never be as much as I could have given. I can never diminish my carbon footprint enough, or give to the poor enough. … Colonialism, slavery, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation—there's an endless list of items for which you and I can take the rap."

We're still shaped by religious categories and the need to feel morally justified, and yet here's the problem that Brooks identifies (and that the gospel addresses):

And yet we have no clear framework or set of rituals to guide us in our quest for goodness. Worse, people have a sense of guilt and sin, but no longer a sense that they live in a loving universe marked by divine mercy, grace and forgiveness. There is sin but no formula for redemption.

The Bible has a lot to say about confession of sin and confessing our needs to one another. Harboring deep and painful secrets is damaging spiritually, emotionally, and physically. An article on Psychology Today highlights studies that have backed up the Bible's view.

• A pioneering studies in the 1970's by the University of Texas at Austin found that: "people who had a traumatic sexual experience as a child or teen were more likely to have health problems as they got older, particularly if they had hidden the trauma from others."
• A wealth of studies from the 1980's to today have led to the general conclusion that: "Secret keepers are more likely to suffer from headaches, nausea, and back pain than others, for instance, and more cases of hypertension, flu, and cancer occur among those hiding trauma."
• Other research has uncovered more harmful effects: "Dale Larson, of Santa Clara University, did a meta-analysis and found that secretive people are more depressed, shame-prone, anxious, and sensitive to judgment, which makes them both tight-lipped and vulnerable to illness."
• Denial, rationalizing and minimizing fears, pain, and addictions is common among those who keep secrets. Clinical psychologist Nando Pelusi writes, "Self-deception is just artful distraction from solving the problem. By not dealing with it, I can sweep it under the rug. That becomes a temporary way to feel better, but it's not lasting."

While the Bible depicts forgetting mostly in dire terms related to apostasy, it also presents some instances when it is a blessing. There are some things we should forget. We do not want to be like the fifty-five individuals in the U.S. who have been diagnosed with hyperthymesia, also known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, HSAM. These people spend an excessive amount of time thinking about their pasts and display extraordinary ability to recall specific events.

Alexandre Wolfe is one of the fifty-five. In an interview for National Public Radio, she described how she remembers every detail of a mundane activity like driving to Target for groceries which occurred more than ten years ago. She remembers what she wore and ate every day for the past decade. She remembers if the fan in the bedroom was running on this date last year. Sometimes this extraordinary ability is an advantage, but at other times—many other times—it is a curse.

One interviewee in the NPR report says that he remembers all the wrongs done against him and all the wrongs he has committed, and that very scenario is the basis of an episode from the television show House. A middle aged character with hyperthymesia remembers everything she said and did since the onset of puberty. She also remembers the wrongs people have done to her and those memories haunt and harass her. The episode demonstrates, as the NPR story states, that "we need to forget as much as we need to remember."