Regret and Restoration
(In The Midnight Library and the book of Ruth)
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.”
The Midnight Library
My mum gave me the Matt Haig bestseller The Midnight Library for Christmas. She sent it in the post, an Amazon Prime order with next-day delivery when last-minute lockdown changes meant I couldn’t go home as I’d been longing to do for a few days over my Christmas holiday.
I read it pretty much cover-to-cover in the bath on Boxing Day, turning page after page as my fingers began to shrivel but my heart, gradually, began to heal. Here was a voice for the missed opportunities of the last year, for the wrong decisions of a lifetime, for the choices not made but much thought about. Here was a story for the ‘what-if?’s, for the ‘if only’, for the ‘would things have been different?’, for the ‘would I have been happier?’.
“That was how she had felt most of her life. Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”
- The Midnight Library
The book follows Nora Seed on a fantastical journey between life, and death, and a multiplicity of other, possible, lives, all via the portal of The Midnight Library, opening book after book to live out all her regrets and ‘what-ifs’.
Nora’s story came back to me the other day while I was reading the ancient Jewish story of Ruth and Naomi, also found in the Christian Bible in the Book of Ruth. This story is set within weighty circumstances: a time of war, violence against women, corrupt leaders and material hardship. Naomi and her husband decide to leave the land assigned to their people, the land that ought to have provided them with security and blessing, and go in search of a better life elsewhere. But Naomi’s husband and her two sons die, and she is forced to return to the land she grew up in, accompanied by her daughter-in-law, Ruth. She tells her friends:
‘Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara, (which means ‘Bitter’) because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.’
The Book of Ruth, Chapter 1
Have you ever noticed how bitterness grows? It starts with sadness, or questioning, and gradually swells into regret. It gathers volume like a ball of fluff, rolling and rolling as it increases in size. It takes up so much space that it can start to block out the light and begin to choke our ability to find any joy at all.
We don’t talk about bitterness very much, and I wonder if that’s because we feel ashamed when we notice it in ourselves. But in this short story, I find a lot of freedom in Naomi’s open confession of her bitterness. She is open about her sadness, her anger at the way the world is, and the pain of her circumstances. Perhaps there is regret, too, about the way that her own choices and their inevitable consequences have played into the life she now finds herself leading. Perhaps she is asking herself: What if we hadn’t left? Would my husband and sons then have died?
In The Midnight Library, when myriad possibilities prove agonising, Nora eventually concludes: “You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.” In Naomi’s story, I see a similar sentiment. Although she reaches a point of self-described bitterness, she doesn’t dwell on the what ifs. She lives her life with intention, fuelled by her hope of restoration. By the end of the story, her friends are no longer calling her ‘Bitter’:
The women said to Naomi: ‘Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.’ Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. The women living there said, ‘Naomi has a son!’
The Book of Ruth, Chapter 4
In Naomi’s story, there is restoration for the heart and the arms that have lost someone to hold. There is restoration for years lost, for security failed, for status ground to the ground. In Naomi’s story, and in ours, it is never too late to believe that restoration is possible, and never too late to be made whole.
Naomi’s story is one in a long tradition of stories about ordinary lives lived in a relationship with the God who made the world and who longs to restore it. These stories give us a pattern for life which brings purpose and vibrancy. But they are more than the power of a positive mindset. They point us to a restored relationship with the God who created us, knows us and shapes our lives. They show us a security defined not by making the right choices but by the knowledge that we are loved, held and cherished by someone who knows all about our complexities and failures. These stories show us arms that we, as the bitter outsider who has lost much and regrets more, can run to, and there find wholeness and restoration.