Never underestimate the value and power of life experiences

Six months ago, I would never have imagined I’d have a seat at the table of an incident management team on a huge bushfire, but there you go.

I’ll take it as a life experience.

Six months ago, I was having different life experiences — building school curriculum on peacemaking with talented teacher advisors and creatives.  Two years before that, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d be managing a project and coordinating the work of skilled and creative teachers, but there you go.

Wind the clock back a little further and things hadn’t worked out well for me — I’ll save you the sordid details.  So, I found myself working for my ex-wife delivering meals for her catering company.  The work was challenging logistically, I sometimes felt like a complete failure, but we made it work for me, and my ex-wife was a gracious boss.  At the same time, I was a school maintenance man (while I was also the school chaplain).  Having left my trade in 1996, I didn’t think I’d be returning to it 20 years later, but there you go.  That, too, was challenging work, problem solving all things mechanical — definitely out of my comfort zone.

Applying for job after job after job and getting knockback after knockback was a life experience.  For someone who thought they’d never be out of work, I had to contemplate earning less than a third what I’d once earned.  No matter how small and insignificant I felt, that I couldn’t provide for my family, for almost five long years, it was still a life experience.

For three years before that I found myself in the role of a full-time pastor.  These, too, were life experiences.  I think I learned more about humanity in these three years than I’d ever learned beforehand.  Such depth of life experience.

During this time, wedged somewhere very close to the middle, we lost Nathanael.  Now, losing him was a life experience!  The genesis of horrendous pain.  That whole three-year time frame was a massive set of life experiences.  And I’m still learning about their impacts.

Studying counselling in graduate school was a life experience, and in many ways, much like other recent life experiences I’ve had, this life experience stripped me down to the core.  I had to face one of my darkest fears; a fear I had no clue existed until it was revealed to me — in therapy.  When we fool ourselves that we have no deeper, darker fears, we’re being foolish — everyone has them; might as well admit it because there’s no fear in that.  On this occasion, I got to face mine and overcome it.  All it took was the willingness to embrace other men.

Being selected by my CEO (who would just a few years later be my state’s governor) to coordinate the port authority’s safety efforts was a life experience.  To serve the executive and its managers.  I couldn’t have seen it coming.  But it did, and the experience was invaluable while it lasted for the three years it did.

Marrying again was a life experience.  For both of us.  I’m not sure who was most shocked regarding how much work we needed to do to make our marriage workable — my wife or I?  Thankfully, a lot of counselling later and by year four we were making a fist of it.  Another steep learning curve — a life experience.

Being single and alone and making sole-parenting work was a life experience.  I discovered, with God’s help, that I could be a capable sole parent.  Among other things, I learned to enjoy taking my daughters out on day long shopping expeditions for clothing and shoes.  I taught my eldest daughter to drive.  That was a life experience for both her and I.  I didn’t do too bad at bringing my daughters up.

Losing my first marriage was a foundational life experience, and probably where I’ll stop looking back.  It was so pivotal that this life experience completely recast my life in the light of God.  I have never experienced pain this raw or this deep.  The experience literally broke me, and yet, as it would be revealed, I needed to be broken.  The worst thing that could have happened ended up for me to be the best thing.

Every loss, change, challenge, betrayal, disappointment, and battle is a life experience.  Some life experiences are traumatising.  And not all of us experience trauma the same.  Yet, there is a certain truth to the saying, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”  It’s rather like, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Whenever we can face hardship as if it’s a lesson, we begin to contemplate what might even break us as a life experience.  Whatever was set up to defeat us can at times be merely the impetus for our overcoming.

But life experience is more than that.  It’s life.  All our experiences.

DISCLAIMER: there are life experiences we can never truly celebrate.  This article isn’t calling us to celebrate what can never be celebrated, but hopefully it helps reframe experience redemptively.