Sometimes I think about how different my mom’s childhood was from my own, not because she was born almost three decades earlier, but because her dad died in an accident when she was only four years old. She lived her whole life without knowing the love of a dad or experiencing the unique ways that good dads tend to challenge and encourage us. She had a good one. But she missed him.

My dad’s mom had cancer back in the 1960s, before there was much hope for recovery. She was sick for nine years, almost his whole childhood, driving with his dad back and forth to Houston for experimental treatments. She succumbed to her long illness when my dad was 17. He knew the love of his irreplaceable mom, but then she was gone, and he missed her.

We could all comb through our memories and think of the things we missed. Maybe it was an opportunity to get married. Maybe it was a friendship that was once vibrant and then died unceremoniously. Maybe it was parents who weren’t good ones, who weren’t who we hoped they would be. Maybe it was the chance to live close to family members who could help us raise babies. Maybe it was good health. Maybe it was children that we pictured growing tall beside us. Maybe it was a long list of dreams that withered on the vine.

We’ve all missed opportunities, missed out on what others got, missed the way things used to be, missed the things that never were. It can become overwhelming when we think about all the things we missed. We wonder why. We question God’s care. We question our own worth. We can grow bitter and angry and let our hearts grow hard.

But there is another way.

An old hymn describes it perfectly: Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace. Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. The songwriter goes on to ask the Lord to teach him a melodious sonnet about the redeeming love of Christ. In a later verse, he acknowledges that only God’s goodness can bind our hearts to Him, and we are all prone to wander. The song brings to mind so many places in scripture where the goodness of God is praised and our tendency to turn away from Him is woefully acknowledged.

I think that the pull to dwell in the heartspace of “What I Missed” is an example of the wandering that we’re prone to do. It’s so very easy to sit in a cold, muddy puddle of what ifs and whys and why nots. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of our enemy’s favorite ways to take our eyes off of Jesus is to encourage us to linger on thoughts of what we don’t have. All those things we missed draw us away if we let them. They cause us to doubt God’s goodness and forget about His mercy and grace, about all that He has given and all the ways that He sustains us. We don’t have to live like that, nor should we. Our spiritual vision gets terribly cloudy when we choose to abide in the things we wish could be instead of in who He is.

God knows our deepest desires. He knows the magnetic power of what if. He knows how quickly our heads turn and our hearts bow to what will never be. He understands what it feels like to have a broken heart. We can cry out to Him like King David did: Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Give me eyes to see Your goodness, even in what I missed.