Every person in this broken world is guilty of wrongdoing. And, at times, we can even admit it. The question is what to do in the wake of our misdeeds, when people are hurting on account of us and we feel the weight of responsibility. The default reaction of our twisted hearts is regret. We expend much time and energy wishing we had done right, even fantasizing about what might have been. This regret often leads into vain attempts at balancing scales. We try to atone for our sin with acts of charity or sacrifice. But God offers us another way, an untwisting of the heart. In the Psalms, we are given prayers not of regret, but contrition. Whereas regret traffics in self-preservation and damage control, contrition yields broken-heartedness and love. Regretful people want nothing more than to wipe failures off their record by any means possible. Contrite people, on the other hand, have given up on salvaging their record and have cast themselves into the mercy and humiliation of God's love.