Empty Tank

"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing." - Oscar Wilde

Just as Oscar Wilde suggests, experiences are gonna cost you something. But with every experience comes great value. The cost? Heart ache, patience, and appreciation to name a few. Wait? Did you say appreciation? Yep, an appreciation that might not come so quickly as we want. Sometimes it may take years for an appreciation of that shock in awe experience or that obstacle you had to conquer. And every now and then a present experience will draw us back to those ah ha moments.

As a kid I spent many summer days hanging out with my gramps. Whether it was fishing, helping him paint, or helping him clean the church with the reward of lunch and a promise to be able to play hoops in the church gym, we were always together. And with it came many stories and lessons learned, mostly about faith.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about rescuing a stranded girl on a very cold night in the city of Chicago. That timely moment would not have happened if I didn't come one inch of the needle shy of running out of gas myself and having to scurry off to find the nearest gas station. This reminded me of a story my gramps had shared, an experience he shared at least a hundred times. After all, those ah ha moments in life are meant to be shared, right?

 Julius Caesar once said, "Experience is the teacher of all things." The following experience not only taught my gramps about faith, but restored my faith in the Greater One who lives within me:

Gramps was living in a farm town south of the south suburbs of Chicago. The road he lived on was just like all the others: a desolate farm road where all the farm houses had long driveways, so long that the actual house was at least half-a-mile from the road. Driving home after a mid-week evening bible study during a snow storm, gramps car ran out of gas. He was on one of those darkened, desolate farm roads about a mile from home. With the snow and wind swirling around he decided to just sit there in his car and pray. He then looked up in his rear view mirror and saw a car with it's lights on parked behind him, and a man carrying a gas can. Gramps got out of his car and approached the man who would ask, "Are you out of gas, sir?" The man would fill gramps car with gas. Once gramps got back in his car he forgot to thank the man, so he got back out of his car to thank him and the car was gone. Gramps said he never saw any lights or the car drive away.

For the hundreds of times I heard gramps tell this story in a sermon or to people in general, his voice or words of the story never wavered nor changed. One day when I was sixteen, gramps would take me down that same desolate road and would share that story again. That made his experience even more real to me. One that I'll never forget.

Remember, unexpected experiences or circumstances may break us or build us, it all depends on how we react. Faith can only happen through experiences; the more experiences the greater the faith.