A Devotional for a Woman in Her Twenties With Regrets — Before Your Twenties Become Your Regrets
⏱ 5 min read
You didn’t plan for it to look like this. Somewhere between the plans you made at nineteen and the life you’re actually living now, something got away from you — a relationship you shouldn’t have stayed in, a year you can’t account for, a version of yourself you’re still apologizing for. If you’ve been searching for a devotional for a woman in her twenties with regrets, it’s probably because the ordinary advice — “just let it go,” “everyone makes mistakes” — has stopped landing. You know that already. What you don’t know is what to do with the weight of it on a Tuesday morning when nobody’s watching.
This isn’t going to be a pep talk. It’s going to sit with you for a minute.
The particular ache of regret in your twenties
Regret in your twenties has a strange shape. You’re old enough to see the pattern — the choice that cost you, the year that felt wasted, the friendship or faith you let go quiet — but you’re still young enough that people keep telling you “you have time.” That phrase can feel like a small mercy or like a dismissal, depending on the day. Time doesn’t undo what happened. It just keeps handing you more days to carry it in.
Some of what you’re carrying might be genuine sin you know you need to bring to God. Some of it might just be ordinary human limitation — the degree you didn’t finish, the year you spent afraid instead of trying, the relationship that ended and left you unsure what you’d missed or dodged. Scripture doesn’t ask you to sort those into neat piles before it will speak to you. It meets you holding both.
What regret is not
Regret is not proof that God is finished being kind to you. It’s not evidence that your life has a permanent asterisk on it now. And it’s not something you’re supposed to manage by refusing to think about it — burying it works about as well as burying anything alive.
The prophet Jeremiah spoke to a people who had far more to regret than a wasted year or a bad relationship — a people who had wandered from God for generations. And still the word to them was: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11, KJV). Not “I know what you deserve.” Not “I’ll pretend it didn’t happen.” I know the thoughts I think toward you. God’s posture toward you was already decided before your regret was.
Where to actually take it
If you’re the kind of person who processes by thinking your way out of a problem, your twenties have probably taught you that regret doesn’t respond to reasoning. You can build an airtight case for why you shouldn’t feel this way, and still feel it. That’s because regret isn’t primarily a logic problem. It’s a trust problem — a quiet suspicion that you, specifically, ruined something that can’t be un-ruined, and that you’re now on your own to figure out the rest.
Proverbs gives a different instruction than “figure it out”: “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6, KJV). Notice it doesn’t say your own understanding is worthless — just that it isn’t sufficient to carry the weight you’re asking it to carry. You don’t have to solve your regret. You have to bring it somewhere.
That same psalm-writer language shows up again in Psalm 32: “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye” (Psalm 32:8, KJV). Instruction implies a future — you don’t teach someone who has no more road ahead of them. If God is still instructing you, He hasn’t written you off as a finished case.
When the fear is that you’ll do it again
Underneath a lot of regret in your twenties isn’t just grief over the past — it’s fear about repeating it. You’ve seen what you’re capable of getting wrong, and now every new decision feels loaded. That’s a heavier kind of tired than ordinary decision fatigue.
Joshua, taking over a nation’s worth of decisions he never asked for, was told plainly: “Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest” (Joshua 1:9, KJV). Courage there isn’t confidence that you won’t mess up again. It’s the promise that you won’t be doing the next decision alone, the way you may have made the last one.
And Romans 12:2 offers something quieter than a clean slate — a slow one: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2, KJV). Renewing — not erasing. Your mind gets rebuilt over time, day by day, not fixed in a single decision to stop regretting.
A practice, not a resolution
If regret has been circling your head at 11pm instead of leaving it, it may not be a thinking problem at all — it may need a place to go that isn’t just your own thoughts, on repeat. Writing it down, honestly, in the presence of a specific verse instead of a vague hope, does something a resolution to “think positive” never will. Philippians puts it this way: “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6–7, KJV). Not peace that explains the regret away — peace that keeps guard over your mind while the regret is still there.
You don’t get your twenties back. But you also aren’t required to spend the rest of them apologizing to a version of yourself that doesn’t exist anymore. There’s a slower way through this — one day, one honest page, at a time.
If some of this landed, a single essay isn’t really built to carry a whole season of regret — that takes more room than one page gives. The Devotional Book for Young Women — Before Your Twenties Become Your Regrets is a 140-day companion built for exactly this stretch of life: a slow, honest place to bring what you’re carrying, a day at a time, instead of all at once.
