Marching Orders

"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want"
-my graduate adviser

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This tidbit of wisdom was given to me in response to a pretty time consuming and money consuming mistake I made in the lab last week. The mistake was definitely not "what I wanted" - so I guess I got "experience". The whole of one day was spent collecting almost 200 leaf samples, which I then began grinding up at 6am the next morning to extract dna from. The process can be long with so many samples, so I had to start early. On day two of the process, at about 6pm (12 hours later), I dropped one of the 2 plates of extracted dna on the ground - I was surprisingly calm - no cursing or crying:) - I just stared at it for a moment to comprehend what happened, figure out if it was salvageable (which it was not), and then continued working with the remaining plate. "Wow! I just lost half of all my work," I thought. Turns out the other plate didn't work either, so I actually lost all of the work that I'd done. 2 whole days of my life wasted!!! Wasted!!! Failures in the lab are quite common I'm told, and are what research is all about - learning via the process. Perhaps I'm not the ideal researcher, because I'm more interested in getting the job done, and do not have time for making such mistakes aka "gaining experience".

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From my journal on 12/18/07 concerning a different minor mishap:
'why do such things occur?' Why so many little frustrations that don't amount to enough to teach me any kind of lesson, but are just a nuisance?

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I put effort, time, and money into things - little things and big things - that don't always go as I've planned: lab experiments, relationships, cooking endeavors... And when they fail I think, "what a waste of time"! Why would God allow me to waste all that time? The obvious answer for the Christian is that God is strengthening, maturing, and drawing us nearer to Him. I think its easier to be convinced of that when we experience big flops, and God is growing us by leaps and bounds, while the smaller nagging ones just seem to be a nuisance. I have plenty of anecdotal flops to tell of - I'm quite good for that:) And most of them have been small scale, but I'd like to think that even though I've not faced any major hardships, God is still shaping and molding me just as much through the little losses I experience daily.

Elizabeth Elliot writes of how growing stronger from dealing with life's little nuisances has helped her not only to face life's greater sorrows, but also to realize that all of life's frustrations, big and small, are not a waste of time, but equally part of a process to draw her nearer to God. She writes:

While I understood in so great loss God surely must have some great gain in mind, I was not nearly saintly enough always to see the little needling trials of the day as my 'marching orders', the very process itself through which God's great gain would be realized. I was to march, not to leap and bound. It was left, right, left, right.

Too often I am concerned with the end result (i.e. getting dna from my leaf samples) and I want to accomplish my goal as quickly as possible. But God's goal is quite different than mine I think - He is less concerned about me getting to some artificial end, and is more concerned with the process itself - a process in which I get to know and experience Him. What seems like a failure and waste of time to me, is probably the exact opposite from heaven's vantage point - a goal accomplished and time well spent. If only I could see it that way too!