What if you look back, like my friend, and all you see is a graveyard of buried dreams, an egg that never hatched, great things that never came, years that passed as a sigh? What do you do when the life that should have been finally escapes the rearview mirror?

“I have nothing to show for my life,” he said.

“No career. Few friends. No spouse. No financial future. Nothing. I’m enslaved to debt, struggle with childhood sins, and have little left to hope for. Don’t hear me say something I’m not, but many days, I wonder why I am still here.”

The season of youth had past. Dead dreams and wrinkled expectations kept him company each night with his pets. He described his life the way Anne of Green Gables had: “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.” And many of his hopes went into the casket alive.

Time picked at his wounds. He felt anger towards church members who betrayed him, resentful towards employees who cheated him, embittered that others had what he only longed for. He had been fighting his sin the best he could — and this is how God repaid him?

Disappointment seemed easier to bear in his youth, but now the sun began to set. Where was the life he always imagined? He stood an undertaker to hopes gone by.

What if you look back, like my friend, and all you see is a graveyard of buried dreams, an egg that never hatched, great things that never came, years that passed as a sigh? What do you do when the life that should have been finally escapes the rearview mirror?

1. Let Go of the Life You Wanted

We must acknowledge that a “hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). If the job never comes, the spouse is never found, the wound never heals, then the delay (and death) of good things should make tears run their course. But the day must come when we lay aside the weight of an unrealized life and run the actual race set before us, looking to Jesus (Hebrews 12:2).

Christ teaches this when he says to “remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32). Instead of pressing forward into the life God called her to, she looked back longingly at Sodom. As a result, God turned her into a pillar of salt. Like her, many of us are tempted to look back longingly, as Demas did when, “in love with this present world,” he forsook Paul (2 Timothy 4:10). Still others of us look longingly to a city we never visited, a life we never lived.

Jesus continues, “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it” (Luke 17:33). The life we hoped for can be one of the hardest to lose. Ghosts are more challenging to kill. But we all must forget what lies behind when it would impede us from straining forward to what lies ahead (Philippians 3:13).

2. Look to the Life to Come

The story of humanity is not “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as Macbeth despairs. It is a tale, larger than our individual cameos, told by a wise and good Creator and, to the Christian, a Father. We must not pretend as if our story is the story, but happily locate our few lines in the scope of God’s redemptive drama. The Christian alone can look upon his (underwhelming) sentence of life, wince for a moment, and then rejoice with joy inexpressible and filled with glory, because in Christ many more chapters — indeed the best pages — still lie ahead. Death is more of a beginning than an end, a comma than a period, an arriving home than leaving it.

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