Grow Through What You Go Through

I had an opportunity to spend some time with my slightly-extended family at a park this evening. It was a great time, with lots of good food and fun playing together. While we were playing, I noticed that one of my nieces was wearing a shirt that said something like "Grow through what you go through," and I thought that was a good message, especially for the young.

We all have growing up to do, and we all have life experiences that can help us do it. The trick is to actually use our experiences to help us grow, rather than just experiencing them. We need to look for the lessons we can learn from our experiences, and we need to use our experiences to help us practice Christlike attributes. These skills are especially useful for younger people, since they have the most growing to do and the most experiences ahead of them, but the skills are also useful for the rest of us. As long as we have experiences ahead of us, we would do well to learn how to use them to grow.

Some say that our experiences, especially our negative ones, are our greatest teachers. I'm not sure I fully agree with that, but I do think that, as long as we need to go through suffering, we might as well use it to help us grow.