Experiences

Experience. A word that is frequent in the english language and seems to be a word that is prevalent in the language of people my age. We are all about getting experience, having an experience, sharing the experience. It seems as though it is a competition to have more and better experiences than anyone else. You want to be the person who has been everywhere, seen it all done it all, but I think this takes away the mystery of God in some ways. Now, I am a person who is all about the experience I am constantly seeking a new experience if I know I am or not. I kind of think of it as building my life resume, having all of these things in hopes of one day being a resource. We have the things that we want to experience but we have the things we don't want to experience, we don't want to experience poverty, hurt, hunger, sickness, pain, death. Yet there we live in a world of hurting people where they are in these experiences.

For P.A. training this year we have been asked to write our stories in 150 words or less. I have had this assignment since May and have been trying to figure out my story. Our stories should be the basic my life before and after but I feel like my life is in the middle. I can't honestly say "look at what the Lord has done and I am now blank, blank and blank." He is in the process of doing those things right now. I was talking this through with my friend last night and he brought this up to me about experiences, and how yeah I don't have this concrete beginning and end Jesus story but I have a handful of experiences. I'm not talking about my experiences like the countries I have gone to, or the jobs and classes I have taken but the things that I have had to endure in life. The things that were not choices of mine but things that significantly made an impact on my life.

So I had my devotional today which was titled "God is Looking for Experienced Help" and I that's when I clued into the things that God was putting in front of my face. The devotional had good points such as "when you go to work for the God and His Kingdom, He will use everything in our past, no matter how painful it was." But what really got me was " look at how you can use the pain for someone else's gain." I started thinking about how I have 16 freshman coming to Spring Arbor that are going to be my "pride and joys" my blessings, my people to love with all of the power I have, plus God's. These 16 people coming here with lives that I have yet to know about and hopefully my pain will be someone else's gain.

Experience. Have it, find it, share it.