As we’ve seen in recent columns, our conscience is at work before, during and after moral choices. While each may present struggles for us, a conscience looking back on a poor choice can be particularly difficult.

The reason is simple: we can’t go back and change it — something especially difficult for many of us.
This highlights the importance of conscience being fully engaged before and during a choice as it may help prevent future regret. Not listening, or not having done the work of forming our conscience well, can cause in us those feelings of guilt or regret. But in God’s providence He can use all things for our benefit.

As much as guilt may get a bad rap, it can serve a useful purpose and be a great spiritual blessing. If our conscience is working properly, choosing something evil or bad should cause us to regret that choice.

That moral regret, coming from the awareness that we chose something wrong, is what we typically mean when we use the term “guilt.”

The blessing of this is that once we acknowledge that wrong and take responsibility for it, we can repent and be forgiven. If we never felt guilt, there would be no compunction to seek forgiveness or avoid the same behavior in the future.

Guilt to a conscience can almost be likened to a fever in the body. It is a natural reaction to something that is wrong within us — something that needs to be set right again or returned to a healthier state.

However, while our body is equipped to do this without our necessarily having to will it, our conscience requires an act of will on our part to begin the healing process.

Seen this way we see its spiritual benefit. It can lead us to seek the healing we need to be in proper relationship with God.

Guilt is really a topic unto itself though because it can come in many forms — some good, some not so good. But a deeper discussion on guilt will have to wait for another time. For now, it suffices to say that a sense of guilt can be the mechanism the conscience employs to try and bring about a return to what is good.

We can probably all think of times when we’ve done something wrong, feel guilty afterwards and then seek healing and forgiveness right away. That is a typical experience of conscience working with something that is now in our past.

But conscience can work in our pasts in another way too — perhaps even in a way we might overlook.
As we grow spiritually, our conscience may not only become better formed, but it may begin to notice wrongs in our pasts that we never noticed before. It might even begin to recognize the fact that there were things we were ignorant of at the time we made a choice.

Or perhaps, in some cases, something from long ago in our lives suddenly comes back to us, even if we hadn’t thought of it for years. We may regret it all over again, or maybe for the first time.

If this happens it might well be God’s providence. Sometimes God seems to reveal things to us from our pasts, not to shame us or make us feel bad, but simply so that we might now seek healing for it. It could be that we are only much later able to fully take responsibility for something and seek the necessary forgiveness.

If we find ourselves experiencing something like this, it may be God trying to nudge our conscience to finally seek the healing we need.

It may be a good idea to even mention these things in our next confession. God wants us to be in proper relationship with Him, and our conscience looking at our past, can be one gift He’s given to bring that about.