Something that we all come to recognize at some point is that experience is a very powerful teacher. The things that we have heard and seen may touch our lives, but our experiences, which combine hearing, seeing, and feeling, have a much deeper impact on us.

My wife is sometimes amazed, but usually confounded and even frustrated, that I have difficulty remembering things we've done together, but that I can remember lines from a movie I haven't seen in thirty years. I've even wondered myself why that is, and the best answer that I've come up with isn't because the movie has music playing in the background, although I think that really helps stimulate our emotions. Instead I believe that it's because I focused my attention on the movie, I wasn't distracted by other thoughts, and in many cases I had the opportunity to see it more than once.

Our experiences are often like movies in our lives. We can play them over and over again in our minds as we remember them, and many of them even get repeated throughout our lives. I don't mean that we experience the exact same thing, but we often have very similar experiences.

The things that happened to us growing up; what we observed in our parents, teachers, and others, are experiences that affect us for the rest of our lives. What those memories end up becoming are beliefs about the way things "are" or how life is supposed to work. A bad experience becomes a fear, the belief that something will hurt us, which we will then try to avoid at all costs. On the other hand, a good experience can become a conviction about what makes us happy and we may spend the rest of our lives trying to relive it.

The Reader's Digest did a survey some years ago about people's greatest fears. Oddly enough, the number one fear wasn't death. The greatest fear for most people is speaking in public.

How about you? Do you get butterflies in your tummy at just the thought of speaking in front of a group of people?

What may have caused that fear was an experience, probably in either kindergarten or first grade, when you had to take part in something called "show and tell". It's likely that you said or did something that made the other kids laugh, which hurt, and that memory has been like a broken record in your head ever since. It just keeps playing again and again and you are convinced that you're no good at doing presentations for groups.

As bad as that may be for some of us, there are instances in our lives that can be devastating, especially in the effect that they have on our faith. For example, have you ever prayed for something and then not gotten an answer?

Just like when the kids laughed in school, the memory of the disappointment over unanswered prayer may be repeating in your mind every time you just think about prayer. Those bad experiences have become a fear, the belief that God doesn't love you, won't listen to you, and never gives you what you ask for.

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