DEVIL'S ADVOCATE?

What If You Could Go Back? (IWouldn't.)

It's Me, JussKyia

Have you ever seen the movie Devil's Advocate?

Al Pacino. Keanu Reeves. Charlize Theron. If you haven't seen it, I'll give you just enough to follow along without ruining it. Keanu plays a young attorney who has never lost a case. That's his identity — I'm a winner. That's what I do. I win. He gets recruited to a prestigious law firm in New York, and from the moment he steps into that world, everything escalates. The money. The power. The lifestyle. And he dives in headfirst.

Meanwhile, his wife — Charlize Theron's character — is unraveling. At the beginning of the movie, she's confident, put together, excited about the future. But as her husband gets consumed by winning, she loses herself. The isolation. The loneliness. The desire for a child that goes unmet. The anxiety that was already in her history rising to the surface. She is torn apart from the inside out while her husband chases a version of success that is destroying everything around him.

The movie goes through all of this — the compromises, the moral failures, the consequences piling up — and then at the very end, there's a twist. It takes the characters back to the original moment. The first decision. The fork in the road. And you sit there thinking: okay, now he'll choose differently. Now he knows what it costs. He'll take the other path.

And I sat there years ago watching that ending, and something in my mind lit up. Not about the movie. About my own life. About cause and effect. About the choices we make and the lives those choices build. And about the question that haunts every honest thinker at some point:

What if I had chosen differently?

I Have Always Thought This Way

I need to give you some context about how my mind works, because this is important to the whole conversation.

When my mother put me out at eighteen, I stepped into the world with no roadmap. No breakdown of direction. No one sitting me down and saying here's how life works, here's how you make decisions, here's what to look for and what to avoid. I had to figure it out. And by the grace of God, He gave me common sense, logic, and a very observant eye. I pick things up quickly. I always have.

But because I started from that place of having to learn everything by living it, I became very present in my thinking. Very aware of cause and effect. When I make a decision, I pay attention to what it produces. And sometimes, after the results come in, I look back and think: I wonder what it would have looked like if I had chosen the other thing.

I never want to change it. I need to be clear about that. I never look back and wish I could erase what happened. Because I believe — deeply, in my bones — that God always gives me His best. And because I believe that where I am is where I am supposed to be. But in my humanness, in the way my mind works — this kaizen type of thinking, always analyzing, always processing — I let my mind wander down the "what if" road. Just for a visit. Never to stay.

The Baby I Begged For

I'll give you the most personal example I have, because it's the one that taught me the most about cause and effect, expectation versus reality, and God's sovereignty over both.

I wanted a child so desperately that I could not imagine life continuing without one. I begged the Lord. I prayed. I cried. I longed. I ached. I dreamed about this child. I fantasized about what motherhood would look like. I planned. I prepared emotionally. I built an entire world in my mind around the child that God had promised me.

And then I got pregnant. Smooth sailing. No morning sickness. No complications. I just gained weight. Easy pregnancy. And then at the end, I had planned for a natural delivery — I wanted to challenge myself, go through the full experience — but because of certain decisions I had made and the weight I had gained, the doctor recommended a C-section. And honestly? I didn't even push back. I was just ready. I was like, okay, let's do this. Let's get this baby here.

And then my son was here.

And it was not what I expected.

I need to say that plainly because I'm not going to pretend. The crying — endless. My husband not as engaged as I had imagined. The whole experience just felt... different from the movie I had been playing in my head for years. I named my son Jeremiah, and then I found out later that Jeremiah in the Bible is the weeping prophet. And I thought: well, that tracks.

Now let me be clear — I am not saying my son was a disappointment. I am saying the experience did not match the expectation. And there is a difference. The expectation was built on years of longing, fantasizing, and desperation. No real experience could have lived up to what I had constructed in my mind. The reality was beautiful in its own way. It just wasn't the version I had pre-written.

And for a little while, I thought about it: what if I had never had a child? What if I had just lived with the longing and never had the experience?

And I answered myself quickly: that would have been worse. Because all my thoughts would have been consumed by the child I never had. I truly believe I would have lived in a quiet misery of unfulfilled desire. The Lord would have comforted me — He always does — but the ache would have been constant. I am grateful for the experience I had, even though it didn't look like what I imagined. I thank God for it every day. Because having the experience — even an imperfect one — is better than spending a lifetime imagining a perfect one that never comes.

You can read my book for all the details. But that's the honest version.

The Husband I Chose

And then there's the other one. The one that's harder to talk about but just as real.

What if I hadn't married my husband? What if I had waited? What if I had been more educated, more informed, more guided on how to choose a life partner? What if someone had sat me down and said here's what to look for, here's the questions to ask, here's the character traits that matter more than feelings? What if I had that knowledge at eighteen instead of learning it at forty?

I would have made different decisions. Of course I would have. Different decisions, different husband, different life, different everything.

And that's where the Devil's Advocate ending comes back in. If I could go back to that original moment — the fork in the road — with everything I know now, would I take the other path?

I thought about it. And then I said no.

Not because the path I took was perfect. It wasn't. But because I believe this is exactly where I am supposed to be. Every experience — the hard marriage, the unexpected motherhood, the financial pressures, the career shifts, the nursing years, the discovery of my calling — all of it built the woman I am today. And the woman I am today is the woman God is using. I cannot separate the person from the path. The path made the person. And the person is exactly who God intended.

The What-If Road Has a Dead End

Here's what I've learned about the "what if" game: it's fine to visit. It's dangerous to live there.

When you visit, it's just your mind doing what God designed it to do — processing, analyzing, imagining, exploring possibilities. That's not sin. That's the incredible capacity of the human mind that God created. The fact that you can sit in one moment and mentally construct an entirely different version of your life is a testament to the complexity of what He built inside your skull.

But when you move in — when you start living in the "what if" instead of the "what is" — you end up in a place where your real life is never good enough. You start comparing your actual story to a fictional one you wrote in your head. And the fictional one always wins because it doesn't have to survive contact with reality. The imaginary husband doesn't leave his socks on the floor. The imaginary career doesn't have bad days. The imaginary life doesn't come with the mess that real life requires.

I don't live there. I visit, and I leave. Because I know something that keeps me grounded: God gives me His best. Not the world's version of best. His version. And His version includes the hard things, the unexpected things, the "this is not what I planned" things — because He is building something in me that comfort alone could never produce.

I Don't Regret. Here's Why.

I started to say I don't regret anything, and then I caught myself and thought — wait, have I?

And I realized: no. I haven't. Not because every decision I made was wise. Some of them were not. But because I have learned to look at everything the way God looks at me. God sees me through Jesus — through what Christ accomplished on the cross. That is the only reason He can view me as righteous. And I have adopted that same lens for my life. I see everything I've been through through God. Through His sovereignty. Through His ability to take the broken decisions and the imperfect outcomes and work them into something that serves His purpose.

Romans 8:28 is not a cliché to me. It is my operating system: "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." All things. Not just the good decisions. Not just the victories. All things — including the C-section I didn't plan, the marriage I wasn't prepared for, the motherhood that didn't match the movie in my head, and the eighteen-year-old girl who got put out with no roadmap and had to build one from scratch.

God took all of it. Every piece. And He is working it for good. Not because the pieces were good. Because the Worker is good.

So no. I don't regret. I reflect. I learn. I thank God. And I keep moving forward.

The Mind He Gave You

I want to close with this, because even as I'm processing all of this, my mind is still going. It's like a million hands plucking at words, at ideas, at connections I haven't even fully formed yet. And that in itself is worth marveling at.

Think about what God created when He made the human mind. The ability to remember the past, analyze the present, and imagine the future — simultaneously. The ability to sit in one reality and mentally construct a completely different one. The ability to feel the weight of a choice you made twenty years ago and simultaneously feel the peace of knowing God was in it. The ability to watch a movie like Devil's Advocate and have it trigger a theological meditation on sovereignty, free will, cause and effect, and the goodness of God.

He made that. He designed a mind that could think about itself thinking. A mind that could question its own choices and then answer its own questions with Scripture. A mind that could wander down the "what if" road and then find its way back to "but God" every single time.

That is fearfully and wonderfully made. That is the image of God operating inside a human skull. And it is one more reason I am grateful — not just for where I am, but for the mind He gave me to process where I am.

So Would I Go Back?

No.

Not to the fork in the road. Not to the original decision. Not to the moment before the choice. I would not take the other path. Not because this path was painless. But because this path was His. Every twist, every detour, every unexpected turn — He was in it. He was working it. He was building me through it.

And the woman standing here today — the one writing this blog, building this brand, studying the Word, raising her children, loving the Lord with everything she has — that woman only exists because of this exact path. A different path would have produced a different woman. And I happen to like this one. Not because she's perfect. Because she's His.

The Devil's Advocate gives the character a chance to go back and choose again. God doesn't give us that option. But He gives us something better: the assurance that the path we're on — with all its imperfections — is the one He is sovereign over. And His sovereignty means nothing is wasted. Nothing is accidental. Nothing is beyond His ability to redeem.

I wouldn't go back. I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't trade it.

Because He gave me His best. Even when His best didn't look like mine.

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