Experience comes through mistakes?

Are you a 'mistake maker'? Oscar Wilde reminds us, "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." If you are anything like me, you intend to do something one way, but when push comes to shove, you find yourself taking a few shortcuts here and there. You start well, but somehow end up with the end looking a bit different than you might have imagined - all because you took those shortcuts. God isn't going to send us to hell for our shortcuts, but he also doesn't want us to develop the habit of always seeking the easiest path in life. He wants to ensure we grow - learning as much as we can from those things that didn't end up exactly as we had hoped!

Proverbs 19:2 tells us, "Enthusiasm without knowledge is no good; haste makes mistakes." To make mistakes is part of human nature. We might not want to admit it, but we make mistakes every day. When we repeat them day after day, we might just want to take some time to explore why we continue to make those same mistakes! We are meant to learn from our mistakes. As our passage tells us, mistakes are linked to 'haste'. It is one thing to do something because there is an urgency associated with it, but when the 'urgency' is because of our procrastination to perform the task in the first place, the 'haste' is really a mistake!

Learn from what you find yourself doing in 'haste' - with more urgency than would be warranted had we responded promptly to the need to perform the task. We also need to remember haste leads to careless actions. We make decisions based upon the urgency of the situation, not the well-orchestrated performance of one who has prepared for the moment. Impetuous decisions lead to impetuous actions. Outcomes from those types of decisions oftentimes leave us feeling kind of guilty and foolish. Why? We actually knew better than to make those decisions, but we didn't take the 'learning' from the last time we made a similar mistake and apply it to the present set of circumstances. 

Experience might just be what comes from making mistakes, but growth is what God really desires! We can 'experience' a great many things, but until we 'experience' growth, we will likely continue to make the same silly mistakes time and time again! Just sayin!