I say that I cannot control the consequences of that past moment—“That is water under the bridge.”
God still controls all the water whether it has passed under my bridge or not. He made the waters above and below the firmament. He turned water into blood. He caused great mudslides in the era of the Judges. He cleansed a sinful world with it while the faithful were in the ark. He walked on it. Surely he can redeem the proverbial water under my bridge. That’s His work of redemption.
I say “That ship has sailed.”
God says, “There are three things that are too wonderful” for my comprehension. One of those things is “the way of a ship in the middle of the sea” (Proverb 30:18,19). God knows every path and deep current of the sea (Psalm 8:6-8). He has dominion! He can promise an apostle that land will be reached without loss of life. He can place Jonah directly from the mouth of a great fish onto the dry land—the beach of opportunity. He can erupt the fountains of the deep (Proverb 8:28,29). Even my idioms about lost opportunities are not applicable when God is the Redeemer.
I say “That door has closed”
God says “Knock and it shall be opened.”
Sometimes the day is very dark and the future looks bleak. But there’s really only one point when the barge of your life has sailed; when the door of all opportunity is closed. We all have an appointment with death. Until then, let’s trust. Let’s trust that our Redeemer replaces lost opportunities with new ones.
The opportunity of attaining forgiveness and starting again is the most tragic of lost opportunities. Someone has said that opportunity often comes wearing overalls and it looks like too much like work. Sometimes opportunity is demanding and a little dirty and it looks too much like sacrifice.
The rich man in Luke 16 had an opportunity. He could have gone out to the gate where Lazarus was lying and taken advantage of God’s powerful redemption at any point prior to his own death. But his ship had sailed at the point of the lifting of his eyes, being in torment. And he wished for just one drop of water to cool his tongue. There was no remaining opportunity. The water he desperately wanted was now “under the bridge”.
Sometimes the last hours before death are intensely difficult. When death follows sickness, the struggle for the faithful— just before the angels come— is often obvious to everyone in the room. When a loved one, due to intubation or shortness of breath or other problems, loses the ability to fully communicate, but looks at caregivers with eyes that plead for some kind of relief, the inability to offer that relief is almost unbearable. Sometimes, as a son or daughter, you are looking at a parent— one who has relieved your own pain, borne your grief, on countless occasions. You would give anything now to ease the struggle as life ebbs away for your loved one, but there is absolutely nothing you can do but pray as the power of life and death does not rest in your hands. 
So my husband called this morning to tell me that my digital gas gauge read zero-miles- remaining when he got to the end of our driveway this morning on his way out. I knew that, though. I live life on the edge about some things. (I’ve actually put it to the test before and I know that my Honda Pilot gauge gives a little grace…at least two miles once it’s reading zero….And, to be honest, I was coming home from the doctor, where my flu test had yielded a positive reading, when I realized I was almost out of gas, so, in my physically compromised state, I thought it was worth the risk.)
Yesterday was my Dad’s 95th birthday. It is hard to believe that he lived in an era in which an automobile was a very rare sight in his community, but then traveled the world during World War Two in a ship called the San Saba. When he was a small lad, he disassembled a radio to try and find the “people” who were “talking in there”. Now he asks us how that tiny phone can possibly contain the answers to any and all questions we ask Siri. He owns the bell and a wooden desk from that one-room schoolhouse in Peaceburg, where he attended when he didn’t have to be in the fields picking cotton (or hiding under the cotton basket so he wouldn’t have to pick). But then he went on to be one of the first in his family, if not the first, to graduate from college. It’s hard to believe he grew up as one of eleven children, a sharecropper’s son, and now he is the single remaining person of that generation of family. He watched the world take flight, man travel to the moon, the building of interstates and infrastructures and internet, as well as the destruction of the Nazi Regime and the Soviet Union. Ironically, he served in a huge worldwide war against injustice in the 1940s while blinking his eyes in 1973 and opening them to the injustice that would take millions more lives than all of the wars in which the US has ever been involved. 
I just watched the slideshow of the faces of those killed in the mass shooting Sunday night in Vegas. It’s just more than you can handle emotionally to think of the young lives (almost all of them young) taken violently, senselessly in that horrible scene. It is WAY more than you can handle emotionally to think of the destination of many of those souls who were unprepared to leave this planet. This much we can rationally know: If one soul–the right soul– had been taught and had embraced, early on, the precepts of HIS gospel, these people would be home with their loved ones tonight. We cannot know the potential good that is done each time we share the Good News. We are debtors to Christ, but also to all potential victims of sin’s destruction, to share the gospel at every opportunity. 
I began my day by reading this blurb from my son-in-law, Ben Giselbach: