The bumper sticker on the back of the pickup truck read, “God teaches, guides, loves, shapes, transforms, strengthens you with experiences.” That’s my pickup truck.

Over the years of actions and inactions, decisions and indecisions, confidence and fear, joy and pain, I have reached the realization that in every moment God is doing all those things for us through experiences. Not that it is easy; life was never meant to be…not since the Garden of Eden. Being born is painful to mother and child alike, and so the cycle of experiences begins. In all those experiences is God.

Everyone has stories that illustrate the truth, though some people’s stories get more visibility and notice than others. I think of how my parents lost their first daughter to leukemia when she was only five, long before I was born. A tragic loss by any measure, one that my parents carried with them to their end of days. It was the process of the loss that brought dad to the church. Did it convert him to a saint? No. Did it improve his chance at salvation?  Likely so.  That is the measure.

God wants each of this children to be saved, to find salvation. Life experiences teach and guide us, they shape, transform and strengthen us, all because God loves us. 

I remember one young woman sitting on the front row of one of my LIFElines workshops presented to a small group of the hostess’ friends. She started sobbing. “I know what I am supposed to do with my life now,” she said. She continued to share her list of experiences that constituted a series of bad decisions with attempts to correct along the way. She saw in the combination of falling and returning to her feet over many years the perfect preparation to become involved with her church in helping others who have experienced abuse, drugs, alcohol and depression, and need help recovering their lives.

What we do with life experiences and what we perceive them to be on the grand scale of things separates joy from sorrow, happiness from sadness, and hope from defeatism.