John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote, “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” Those words are the sad commentary on many a life. People start with such great promise and have such golden opportunities. But they make the wrong choices and miss their opportunities and so never reach their potential. Their lives are the “tragedy of what might have been.”
Some years ago I read an editorial entitled “The Dostoevsky Who Might Have Been” (Christianity Today, 1981). He was a Russian child of a surgeon, a gifted intellectual, an up-and-comer of czarist society. He was a young socialist, and his first novel was a bestseller, lauded by critics and the public alike. He was only 25 when it...