"Might Have Beens"

A few weeks ago I read a devotional in My Utmost For His Highest that has really been on my mind lately. First, a little background. It's been almost one year since we came out here to D.C. to househunt. That was a very stressful time, but we ended up writing a contract for the house we are now in. Before that, back in late September, 2003, we were trying to figure out where we should go for our next assignment, and we had 2 options. One was to go to Huntsville, AL, and the other was to come here to the NRO. Since our good friends are here, we decided to push for the NRO assignment, but it was certainly never what you might call "smooth sailing". It took forever to get the clearances, so our report date kept getting pushed farther and farther back. This kept pushing our househunting back too, so by the time we came out here, we were in the thick of the season, with all that stress and competition. After we ratified our contract and went back to Ohio, we had a lot of stress with our house back there. We tried to sell it FSBO. We had a couple who wanted to buy it, but it turned out they really were more interesting in just renting. They weren't very easy to work with, and after lots of stalling on their side just to sign the lease, we kind of panicked and told them we were putting it back on the market. They were furious, so there was lots of horrible stress there. We did sell the house quickly after that, but since things were so bad with the first couple, I never felt any peace about it, and in fact, it still make my stomach clench up to think about. "A lack of peace" is pretty much a good way to describe this whole last year.

So anyway, back to the devotional. Here is what has been bothering me so much:

The unfathonable sadness of the "might have been"! God never opens doors
that have been closed. He opens other doors, but He reminds us that there
are doors which we have shut, doors which need never have been shut,
imaginations which need never have been sullied. "

I just keep thinking, what if we really closed a lot of doors because we weren't hearing God's leading? What if we are now in the totally wrong place? What if we should actually have gone to Alabama? What if we kept on making wrong decisions, and now we have so totally diverged from where we should have been? It's bothered me a lot before I read that devotional, which I guess just put it all into words. I am married to someone who likes to rehash things over and over and over, so we have certainly talked about the whole scenario multiple times, and I don't know if that's been really healthy. It tends to make me less and less sure about our decisions. And I still don't know what we would have done differently--I can rationalize all our decisions very cogently. I just still don't feel peaceful about it all. Now that Bob is looking to the future (after he retires), he always wants to talk about it, but I am so leary of making more mistakes or having such a bad experience, that I really am not interested in planning or even really talking about it at all. It's so easy to blithly say, "We'll go where the Lord leads us!"--but what if there is no clear leading, just like for this last move. Decisions have to be made, but what do you pick? And then you pick something and close another door . . .