After Missing the Exit

In recent years, “second-chance” or “rebirth” stories have become enormously popular.

The protagonist somehow returns to her younger years, carrying with her all the wisdom and experience she gained later in life. This time, she will not marry the wrong person. She will not trust someone she should never have trusted. She will not miss that opportunity. At every crossroads where she once made a regrettable choice, she chooses differently—and in the end, she gets the life she wishes she had lived.

Why are stories like these so satisfying?

Perhaps because they touch a longing many of us carry but rarely say aloud:

If only I could do it over.

If only I had listened to that advice. If only I had not made that decision. If only I had understood then what I understand now. Perhaps my life would have turned out completely differently.

Regret is not necessarily a bad thing. Often, it is precisely because we have grown that we can finally see where we went wrong.

But that is also where another question begins: Once I finally understand what I should have done, does doing the opposite now necessarily make things right?

I think of the times I have missed an exit while driving on the highway.

Sometimes I was distracted; sometimes the navigation system gave the instruction too late. I watch the exit slip past, and immediately the GPS recalculates: take the next exit, turn around, and come back another way. I glance at the map and realize I may have to drive ten or fifteen extra miles. Naturally, I think, If only I could back up to that exit and take the right road.

But everyone knows that one of the most dangerous things you can do on a highway is reverse because you missed your exit.

The exit is already behind you.

The safest and most sensible thing is not to force your way back to the place where you should have turned. It is to acknowledge where you are now, allow the route to be recalculated, and continue from there.

Life, of course, is much harder than driving. Some missed exits cost us not ten extra miles, but ten or twenty years.

And when we finally realize that we took a wrong turn, it is easy to assume that repentance means somehow returning to that old exit and making the choice we should have made then.

But Scripture has gradually shown me that the repentance God gives us does not seem to work that way.

There is a striking incident in the book of Joshua.

After Israel entered Canaan, the Gibeonites, fearing for their lives, pretended to have come from a distant land and persuaded Israel to make a covenant with them. Scripture records one crucial detail: “The men took some of their provisions, but did not ask counsel from the LORD” (Joshua 9:14).

The covenant itself arose out of deception and Israel’s failure to seek God. Yet the covenant had been made, and Israel’s leaders had sworn an oath in the name of the LORD. Once they discovered the deception, they could not simply say, “This decision was wrong from the beginning, so we will act as though it never happened.”

History had moved forward.

Years later, during Saul’s reign, Saul sought to destroy the Gibeonites “in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah” (2 Samuel 21:2).

At first glance, Saul’s action might look like an attempt to correct an old mistake. The Gibeonites were Canaanites. Saul was zealous for Israel. From a human perspective, his actions could even be described as restoring things to the way God had originally commanded them to be.

A reset.

But in doing so, Saul violated a covenant that had already been made. Second Samuel makes it clear that years later, during David’s reign, God held Israel accountable for this bloodguilt.

God’s response to the Gibeonite incident is startlingly clear. He did not permit Israel to erase the covenant simply because it had originated in deception and failure. When Saul tried, in the name of zeal for God, to wipe away that piece of history, God upheld the obligation created by the covenant.

God had not changed. Rather, human choices, once they enter history, can create new responsibilities.

Yet when we face realities created by our past choices, our most natural impulse is often to make them disappear.

We regret a relationship because it has brought us pain. We regret a decision because its cost was greater than we imagined. We regret words we once spoke because they permanently changed the way someone sees us. The pain of those consequences can be very real.

The story of Amnon and Tamar exposes this human impulse in a particularly disturbing way.

After Amnon violated Tamar, his desire instantly turned into intense hatred, and he ordered her to be thrown out. He moved from “I must have her” to “I want her gone.” The direction changed completely, but the center did not change at all: he could not bear the reality his sin had created.

To escape the consequences of his first sin, he immediately inflicted a second wound.

This exposes a blind spot in what we sometimes call regret: How much of our regret comes from truly recognizing that we have sinned against God, and how much comes simply from being unable to tolerate the consequences of our choices?

Hating the consequences of sin is not the same as turning away from sin.

Then consider David.

After David sinned, Nathan came to him and said, “You are the man.”

David’s response was simple: “I have sinned against the LORD.”

Nathan immediately told him that the LORD had put away his sin. Yet at the same time, the consequences set in motion by David’s sin did not disappear.

Both things were true at once: his sin was forgiven, and yet he still had to live with realities his sin had brought into his life.

The consequences Nathan announced extended far beyond the death of David’s child. The sword would not depart from David’s house, and calamity would arise from within his own family. For many years afterward, David lived within realities that could not simply be erased.

The death of the child was one of the first.

While the child was sick, David fasted, lay on the ground, and pleaded desperately with God. As long as the child was alive, David continued asking God to change what was happening.

But after the child died, David rose from the ground, washed, changed his clothes, entered the house of the LORD and worshiped, and then returned home and ate.

His servants could not understand him.

David explained that while the child was alive, he had thought, “Who knows? The LORD may be gracious to me.” But now that the child was dead, he asked, “Can I bring him back again?”

The more I think about this, the more I see another very real dimension of repentance.

What can still be repaired, we should seek to repair. What can still be brought before God in prayer, we should pray for. But when something can no longer be changed, we must not create another wrong in an attempt to escape what has already happened.

Sometimes genuine repentance means learning to live faithfully before God while carrying consequences that cannot be undone.

This is not fatalism, nor does it mean that suffering does not matter. It means becoming willing to acknowledge reality:

This really happened.

I really made that choice.

Some losses really cannot be recovered.

Some responsibilities really did come into existence because of what happened.

And yet, even here, I can still follow God.

Real life presents us with situations where this distinction can be difficult to discern.

Imagine a woman who comes to faith after many years of marriage. Her husband does not believe. As her faith deepens, she becomes increasingly aware of how profoundly their differences in faith, values, and direction affect their marriage.

Sometimes she cannot help thinking: If I could choose again today, I would certainly marry someone who shares my faith. Now that I know God, shouldn’t I leave this marriage and choose a life that is more aligned with His will?

The thought can be very appealing.

But when she came to know God, she was already standing inside a marriage. Life did not rewind to the years before her wedding so that she could make the choice again with the spiritual understanding she has today.

The question she now needs to ask God is not, “If I were unmarried today, whom should I choose?”

It is, “Lord, now that I am here, how do I follow You?”

Paul addresses precisely this kind of situation in 1 Corinthians 7.

He says clearly that if a believer has an unbelieving spouse who is willing to remain in the marriage, the believer should not divorce that spouse (1 Corinthians 7:12–13). Throughout the chapter, Paul speaks about marriage, circumcision, slavery, and other circumstances already established in a person’s life, repeatedly returning to a principle: “Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them.”

Paul is not saying that circumstances can never change. He even says that if a slave has an opportunity to gain freedom, that opportunity may be taken. Yet a remarkable principle runs through the chapter:

When the gospel enters a person’s life, it does not first restore life to its factory settings.

The past still happened. Responsibilities already created still exist. But the person now belongs to Someone new and has received a new direction.

Repentance does not mean returning to the starting point. It means turning toward God from where we stand today.

This is very different from the “rebirth” stories we enjoy.

In those stories, a person carries today’s wisdom back into yesterday and gets to choose again. The gospel does not send us back into yesterday. Instead, grace meets us today and gives us a new beginning from here.

A reset and repentance can sometimes look remarkably similar. That may be precisely why we need to distinguish them carefully.

A reset centers on the outcome: I do not like where my choices have brought me, so I want to undo the mistake and produce a different result.

Repentance centers on our relationship with God.

It does not say, “Lord, I finally know the correct answer. Now let me fix everything and put my life back the way it should have been.”

It says, “Lord, I know I was wrong. But because I took that wrong turn, where I stand today is no longer where I stood then. I do not know what faithfulness looks like from here, so I am coming back to ask You.”

What most needs to be restored may not be our former circumstances, but our relationship with God.

Yesterday we failed to seek Him and took the wrong road. Today, even after recognizing yesterday’s mistake, we cannot simply rely on our new wisdom to redesign the route ourselves.

We still need to ask:

Lord, where am I now? From here, how do I follow You?

Sometimes God truly does give us an opportunity to begin again. A door that had closed opens once more. Something once lost is restored. A road we never imagined appears before us. When God gives such things, we can receive them with joy. They are grace.

But grace is not the same as a self-directed reset.

We cannot reverse down the highway simply because we dislike where our choices have taken us—and then call it renewed obedience to God.

When I miss an exit and the GPS recalculates, I still feel annoyed. I really didn’t need to drive all these extra miles.

Life can be like that too.

There are roads we truly did not need to travel. There are prices we truly did not need to pay. Admitting that is not a lack of faith. Repentance does not require us to romanticize the past and say, “Actually, everything happened exactly as it should have.”

Wrong was still wrong.

Loss is still loss.

But God’s grace does not require a correct past in order to create a faithful today.

True repentance is not finally discovering how to get back to where we were.

Sometimes it is finally giving up our insistence on going back.

We come again before God and say:

Lord, I have come this far. From here, how do I walk with You?