Why Do We Need Experience?

What's unfortunate is that I, both as a teacher and as a blogger, feel obligated to give my audience new information and insights, and not just raise spiritual and philosophical questions I don't yet know the answer to.

Case in point: I was just reading the revelations Joseph Smith received in Liberty Jail and excerpts from the letter(s?) he wrote from it, hoping to find insights worth sharing with my primary class and whomever reads my blog. Of course, I found the passage where the Lord says to Joseph Smith that even if thing get really bad and he has to suffer through a lot of negative experiences, "all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good" (D&C 122:7).

Now, this could easily turn into a blog post and/or spiritual thought about how everything we experience contributes to our growth and works out to our benefit, but the question I found myself asking, and that I'd like to explore tonight, is why experience is good for us. Why is experience, particularly negative experience, so important that we needed to come to Earth to get it? What do we gain from experience?

As a role-player, I found it odd that I was asking this question. In role-playing games that use experience, the value of experience is obvious and immeasurable. Experience makes you stronger. Specifically, experience adds up until you have enough to level up, which greatly increases your power in several ways, depending on which specific game you're playing. Experience is so valuable in role-playing games that players regularly go out of their way to get more of it.

Yet, that's not how experience works in real life (surprise, surprise). We don't level up when we hit certain milestones measuring how much experience we've gained. In real life, we have more gradual growth, and our growth is tied more to what we do than to what we experience. But if experience doesn't make us physically stronger or grant us magical powers, what does it do for us?

Our experiences give us wisdom (assuming we learn from them), but I kind of wonder what wisdom is useful for, eternally. Certainly, in mortal life, we can use all the wisdom we can get, but will that be true in the afterlife? Will we need wisdom after we die? Wisdom helps us make wise choices. Will we still have to make choices once we've entered into heaven?

Perhaps so. God wouldn't have bothered to give us agency if we weren't going to use it, and I don't think this life was all He had in mind. Agency seems to be a pretty big deal to God, and there has to be a reason for that. Could it be that, even after we've become perfect and achieved the highest glory of the Celestial Kingdom, we may still need to make choices. It seems odd to think about a Celestial Being having to make choices, but, when you think about it, God makes choices all the time, and it's imperative that He make good ones. If we ever find ourselves in a position where we have to make wise decisions that affect countless others, we're going to need a lot of wisdom, and we gain wisdom through experience.

Another answer is that our experiences make us better people, morally, or at least they can. Our experiences help us develop compassion, making us more Christlike. Thus, suffering through afflictions and enduring them well helps us achieve one of the main purposes to life on Earth. We all have a responsibility become more like Jesus Christ than we are now, but what about after this life? Will we continue to need the become better people after we have already become perfect?

Perhaps not,  but even if God knows He can safely live without additional experiences and the spiritual progression they bring, that doesn't mean that we don't need them and it. We are not perfect yet. Thus, we need to continue to change for the better, and our experiences can help us do that.

Still, are they really necessary? Having bad experiences isn't the only way to become better people, and it probably isn't the only way to gain wisdom, either, which brings me back to the question I started with: Why do we need to gain experience? I don't know the answer to that question yet, but I hope that, as I gain more experience, I will eventually learn the reason why it's so important for me to do so.