Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Good morning from Colorado! By now, we have established that being willing to learn matters and that the person with something to teach us may not look like the teacher we expected. Today, I want to look at something a little closer to home: our own experience.
Experience is valuable. It teaches us what we’ve lived through, what worked, what didn’t, and sometimes what we never want to experience again. We earn experience one day, one mistake, one success, and one difficult season at a time. But there is something I’ve learned about experience: it can either make us wiser or make us believe we’ve already learned everything there is to know.
That’s where we have to be careful.
When we’ve been through something several times, we naturally develop an expectation about how it will turn out. We recognize certain patterns. We know what we’ve seen before. We may even become confident enough to tell ourselves, “I know exactly where this is going.”
But what if we don’t?
Life has a way of introducing new circumstances into familiar situations. The people may be different. We may be different. The timing may be different. And God may have something completely different in mind.
Our previous experience can give us perspective, but it shouldn’t become a permanent set of instructions for every situation we encounter.
I’ve had to learn that there is a difference between remembering what I’ve learned and assuming I already know what happens next.
One keeps me grounded.
The other can keep me stuck.
Think about how easily we can carry old conclusions into new seasons. Something didn’t work before, so we assume it won’t work again. Someone disappointed us, so we expect the next person to do the same. We made a mistake once, so we become afraid to try again.
Sometimes what we call wisdom is actually fear wearing the clothing of experience.
That’s a hard thing to admit.
Experience should help us recognize possibilities, not eliminate them. It should teach us to move with greater wisdom, not prevent us from moving at all.
And this is where I think remaining a student becomes so important.
A student doesn’t assume that because she passed yesterday’s test, there won’t be another lesson tomorrow.
She understands that every new season can bring something she hasn’t encountered before.
There have been times in my own life when I’ve looked back and realized I understood something completely differently than I did when I first lived through it. The circumstances hadn’t changed. I had.
Sometimes maturity gives us eyes for things we couldn’t see before.
That’s why I don’t want to become so attached to what I already know that I can’t make room for what I still need to learn.
God can use our experiences without allowing them to define our expectations. He can take the things we’ve survived and turn them into wisdom, compassion, patience, and discernment. But we have to leave room for Him to show us that the next chapter doesn’t have to look exactly like the last one.
Maybe that’s part of what it means to grow.
Not forgetting what we’ve learned, but refusing to believe that yesterday’s lesson is the final word on tomorrow.
There is still something to discover.
There is still something to understand.
There is still room to grow.
And there may still be a lesson waiting for us that our experience alone cannot teach.
I’ll see you tomorrow for another 15 Minutes with God.
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