This month’s ‘Servants’ meeting featured a message by veteran missionary Joe McKinney. The lesson was entitled “Regrets, remorse and repentance of an old church worker”. He began by relating an interview he read in a magazine of a man dying of AIDS. The man was asked, “If he had his life to live over again, would he change anything about it?” The man replied that he would change absolutely nothing!

That answered prompted Joe to reflect upon this question in his own life. His answer was much different. A fool doesn’t learn from his mistakes. A good man does. However, the wise man learns even from the mistakes of others. There are many things he would change if he had it to do over, and he shared a few of them with us.

After thirty-five years of producing countless Bible lessons and study materials by the two-fingered ‘hunt-and-peck’ method, he regrets never having taken the time to learn how to ‘touch-type’. So much more could have been produced if he would have done so. Last month he began a course to learn how to do it.

Related to this, but on a deeper level, he expressed another regret of “Putting the cart before the horse”. He felt he had too often let the ‘urgent’ take the place of the ‘important’. An example he gave was taking the time to develop a really satisfying devotional life (quiet-time) with God. He still plans to do this.

The other regrets involved how he has treated others. One is taking the time to truly know a person and understand why they behaves the way they do. Not just seeing the “Tip of the iceberg” that we all present to the world. Only then can we truly help someone.

There were others but space prohibits listing them here. His message is available on the internet. Click here if you’d like to listen to it. It’s in Portuguese (but don’t let not learning it be one of your regrets :-).

There were forty church servants present from ten congregations in Recife. It was very edifying for all.