“Experience doesn’t make you better.
Only evaluated experience makes you better.”
-Howard Hendricks, Professor at Dallas Theological Seminary
This quote was referred to in Communicating for a Change and I really liked it. I like a lot of what Howard Hendricks has had to say over the years and there are few people I’ve enjoyed listening to more in person.
We like to take comfort that time or experience is by itself a positive component in growth and transformation. The phrase “God’s using this to make me (or you) stronger” often assumes that experience alone is somehow transformational. I agree that it’s transformational – but it’s not clear as to what one is being transformed into.
Experience can lead us towards negative or positive transformation depending on how we go through that experience and whether we assess our experience accurately and make appropriate changes. Some experiences I’ve had have led to great personal growth and to new levels of responsiveness to God and other people. Some of my experiences produced within me more of a hardened heart towards God and other people. Some experiences almost automatically have produced new skills and things that helped me later in life. Other experiences I’ve had to have over and over again before I made the slightest change or adjustment in how I was approaching something.
Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend in How People Grow have called this the difference between “good time” and “bad time.” Bad time is unredeemed time – time spent outside of the ongoing presence of grace and truth. Good time is redeemed time because grace and truth are actively doing its work over time to produce change in our lives. I think this is a helpful way of looking at experience. Our experience can either be a good time experience or a bad time experience. Our capacity or willingness to face the truth of our realities and be learners in community will dictate whether our experiences are transformational in a positive way.
This is what I think Hendricks is talking about when he says that only evaluated experience makes us better. We don’t change and grow by denying reality and repeating the same mistakes, but we change and grow by working to see our reality for what it is and accepting responsibility to learn from those experiences for the sake of the future.
by Beav
http://www.brianvirtue.org/2008/09/experience-and-evaluation/