What Advice Would You Give Your Younger Self?

If you could give your younger self advice in three words, what would you say?

My answer is usually: “Don’t do it.”

We’ve all made mistakes we wish we could go back and avoid. But we’re not time travelers so we have to live with the mistakes and bad decisions we’ve made.

C.S. Lewis said that God is outside time so he sees everything in the past, present, and future: “Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty… is always the Present for Him.”

And yet we humans are stuck in time and we live chronologically.

Our view is limited, for now, and so we’re often stuck with sorrow and regret.

If I could go back in time, I'd tell both my 16-year-old self and my 30-year-old self to avoid certain bad decisions. But would it even help? In life, we don’t suddenly get it right for once and then move forward only making good decisions. We keep making mistakes. I did things I regret when I was sixteen. I did things I regret last week. I did things I regret this morning.

So, when we propose going back in time and advising our younger selves, do we mean 50 years ago, 20 years, or five minutes?

The late Christian singer Rich Mullins was once interviewed by an evangelical organization. They wanted to know when he had first become Christian or had been "born again." Rich answered, "Which time?" He then said he used to get born again about once a year. Then, in college, it turned into more of a quarterly thing. Finally, by the time he hit his forties, he was getting born again about 4-5 times a day.

Not to poke fun at the popular evangelical conception of being born again (I came from that tradition and have great affection for it), but Mullins hit on a profound truth. Repentance and conversion are an ongoing process that never stops, presumably until we die.

It would be amazing if we could time-travel and give our younger selves advice.

But God hasn’t designed our experience of time that way. Instead, we must make choices for ourselves and then live with the joys or regrets of those choices.

Some of us have done and said things that have caused severe damage to ourselves and others. Sometimes we’ve just done embarrassing things. (I’m glad I grew up in a time when no one had a cell phone that could capture my every action and then post it online for the whole world to see!) Some mistakes are bigger than others, and some regrets are more profound.

But if we are called to become like Christ, that means treating people—including ourselves—like Christ did. When a woman was caught in adultery (John 8:3-11), he didn’t ask her to go back and give herself better advice. He knew her sin had already been committed. As much as she'd like to change it, she couldn't. He didn't condemn her. He told her to move forward and sin no more.

“What would you go back and tell your younger self?” is a helpful, thought-provoking question. It can get us to think about making better decisions in the future.

But it doesn’t seem to be a question Jesus asks.

We made our mistakes. We made our choices. He already knows it as well as we do. We may now have to live with the consequences, but, according to Scripture, God doesn’t hold our poor decisions against us. He doesn't ask us “What would you have done differently?” but “Going forward, what will you do now?”

Though we ought to feel contrition for our sins, it is the enemy who wants to keep us stuck in the past.

What if we took a positive spin on the question, just like Jesus seems to do?

Yes, maybe I’d tell my younger self: “Don’t do that one thing.” But what about “Do this other thing instead”?

And what is that “other thing”? It’s probably making a wiser choice, sure. But it’s also “Forgive yourself.” If I could revisit my 16 or 20 or 40-year-old self, I might say, “Well, the damage is done, so what now? I forgive you. Learn from it and do better going forward.”

What if the three words of advice we gave our past selves were:

“We’re all sinners.”
“These things happen.”
“Life isn’t over.”
“You’re still loved.”
“Do better now.”

We tend to be harder on ourselves than others are, and harder than God is on us. It makes sense because we live in our own skin, with our own personal mess of bad memories, mistakes, and regrets. But to quote C.S. Lewis again: “You can't go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

The better question is not “What advice would you give your younger self?” but “What will you do now?”