Look for the Honey

In their book, The Laws of Lifetime Growth, authors Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura explain, “Continual learning is essential for lifetime growth. You can have a great deal of experience and be no smarter for all the things you’ve done, seen, and heard. Experience alone is no guarantee of lifetime growth. But if you regularly transform your experiences into new lessons, you’ll make each day of your life a source of growth. The smartest people are those who can transform even the smallest events or situations into breakthroughs in thinking and action. Look at all of life as a school and every experience as a lesson, and your learning will always be greater than your experience.”

In an old Peanuts cartoon, Charles Schulz shows Charlie Brown at the beach building a magnificent sandcastle. It’s a work of art. As he stands back to admire it, suddenly it’s destroyed by a big wave. In the last frame he says, “There must be a lesson here, but for the life of me I don’t know what it is.” That’s how many of us feel after a potentially valuable experience. We go through it but don’t grow. We attend meetings designed to help us learn, then do nothing with what we’ve heard after closing our notebooks.

A few days after slaying a lion, Samson returned to the scene of victory and discovered two things in the carcass: (a) Bees, that sting. (b) Honey, that tastes sweet. “He took some” (Judges 14:9).

In life, move beyond the pain and look for the honey!

Peter Morphew
School Chaplain