As I am finishing up the book "Communicating for a Change" I read a great quote and I wanted to pass it along. Here is the quote "Experience doesn't make you better, only evaluated experience makes you better". Repeat that to yourself a couple times. I can experience something 10 times and not learn anything from it. Not everything is as shocking and revealing to us as a light socket we were not supposed to touch. How many times have we done things over and over, and made no changes, yet we have expected different results.

Think of it this way: How many people do we know that get themselves in bad relationship after bad relationship? We all know a lot of people who have done this (some of them were us). They have experienced pain, hurt and so many more things, yet the very next person they are with has the exact same qualities as the person from before. They are doing the same things (getting experience) and not getting different results (no evaluation has taken place). So in order to get more experience we don't necessarily need more failure, we need to take a step back, ask God what you can learn from it, and move forward, and don't do the same things you used to do. This applies for the sin in our lives too.