Have you ever wondered why you are experiencing trouble in your life? Tough experiences are not necessarily always bad. Sometimes they bring needed insight.
A new professional banker president asked the previous bank president the source of success. The experienced banker replied, “making good decisions.” “How do I do that?” the young banker asked. “Experience!” the older banker answered. Puzzled, the new one asked, “How do I get experience?” The old one replied, “by making bad decisions.”
Experience is a tough teacher; it gives you the text first and the lesson later. God looks for experienced help! When you work for him, he uses everything you have been through, no matter how painful. He sees it all as tuition paid. Joel Osteen said “it’s in the difficult times that we are growing, and you can not just rebuke everything hard. We have got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.”
Perspective changes everything, especially when you learn to see your life’s experiences through fresh eyes. For example, suffering in a particular area like guilt, fear, anger, frustration, or insecurity qualifies you to understand and help others. Experience is not what happens to you, as much as what you do with what happens to you. So, with that in mind, ask yourself today, “Could my pain become someone else’s gain? Could a ministry to others come out of this mess I am in?”
When you experience times of testing you have several choices: give up or grow up. It is your choice. There is no substitute for experience. A friend told me about lessons learned on a little league baseball team. The boys were so upset about a game that they had not won. Mulling over the lost, the coach said to them, “You didn’t lose, you learned.”
Sometimes life’s teaching is hard to accept especially when you have tried so hard to be successful. However, never look at life’s tests as being defeated but look at it as a learning experience. Muhammad Ali, who claimed to be the greatest boxer said “all through my life, I have been tested. My will has been tested, my courage has been tested, my strength has been tested. Now my patience and endurance are being tested.” So, when you are going through the next test in your life, consider it a blessing and learn from the test. And Never Give Up! Never Give Up! Never Give Up!
By Chaplain Ghosten
chaplain@lhp.net
