One thing I have come to understand about myself is that when life seems to be going well, I can quickly begin to believe that I must be on the right track.

When the decisions work, relationships are healthy, and the things I have invested in begin producing the results I hoped for, it becomes easy to connect the dots. I did this, this happened, so this must be the way that it works.

Then another temptation begins to creep in. I start believing that what I have learned can assist with something else, or I can provide the answer for someone else.

There is value in sharing what we have learned. Experience matters. Wisdom passed from one person to another can save years of unnecessary pain. But I am beginning to understand how quickly experience can translate into certainty, and certainty can quietly convince us that we have graduated from being a student.

For instance, I have worked in the horticulture industry for more than 25 years. There was probably a time when I thought that much experience would eventually mean I understood most of what I needed to know.

But the opposite has happened.

The more I learn about trees, soils, plant health, insects, disease, water, and roots, the more aware I become of how little I actually understand. There are things I believed ten years ago that I would explain very differently today.

A recent irrigation audit reminded me of this very thing.

At first glance, the system looked like it was working. Water was coming out of the heads, the lawn was getting wet, and nothing seemed obviously wrong. But instead of assuming that meant the system was doing its job, we measured what was actually happening.

One area was receiving only an eighth of an inch of water while another was receiving close to an inch during the same run time. The system was running, but it was not necessarily working well.

It would have been easy to trust what I thought I saw. But the measurements told a different story. So, experience should not make us quicker to assume that we are right. Instead, it should make us more willing to verify what we think we know.

I’m so grateful that 25 years has not brought me to the end of learning. If anything, it has shown me just how much there still is to learn.

I see the same thing in leadership.

I don’t know how many times I have had to take my foot out of my mouth because I assumed I knew what was going on before I had taken the time to listen or investigate. I thought I knew what happened. I thought I understood someone’s motives. I thought I knew what needed to be corrected.

Then I learned more and realized I had been wrong. More times than I care to admit.

Ask just about anyone who has worked alongside me; they would agree.

I have read countless leadership books, attended conferences, made mistakes, experienced success, and watched ideas both work and fail. But none of that makes me immune to assumptions. If anything, experience can make assumptions more dangerous because I can become very confident in them.

But I know now that people are not formulas. What has helped me grow may not be what someone else needs. What motivates one person may discourage another. A principle that works in one season may fall flat in another.

The principle is not necessarily wrong. Sometimes life is simply more complicated than the formula I tried to make from it.

Marriage has taught me something similar. I’ve been married for more than 30 years, and I‘m incredibly grateful for that. But 30 years of marriage doesn’t mean I’ve mastered being a husband. If you ask my wife, she will tell you it has taken me 30 years to discover how much more I still have to learn.

Experience has a way of giving us confidence. But boy oh boy, does life have a way of humbling it.

We think we understand how something works, and then something happens that doesn’t fit the explanation we created. The tree doesn’t respond the way it should. The person doesn’t react the way we expected. The business decision that once worked stops working. The relationship enters a season we never anticipated. The prayer is answered differently than we hoped.

And there we are again. Students.

Some lessons challenge what I know. Others have challenged who I think I am. Perhaps nothing has challenged both more than suffering.

I recently read another reflection from Oswald Chambers about how God can use experiences we don’t understand at the time to prepare us for something we cannot yet see. That thought has stayed with me because suffering has probably taught me more about the limits of what I know than almost anything else.

There are experiences in my life I would never have chosen. Yet looking backward, I can see how some of them humbled me, softened me, and changed the way I see other people.

The gift was never the suffering itself. The gift has been what God refused to let the suffering waste.

One of the things I am still learning from it is that another person’s pain does not always need my answer. Sometimes they simply need my presence. That is difficult for me because I want to ease another person’s burden, and my instinct is often to try to fix what hurts.

But maybe listening is sometimes more useful than answering.

I think that is one of the dangers of believing we have life figured out. We become so eager to teach that we forget how to listen. We become so confident in our experience that we forget another person may be living a story we know nothing about. We become so focused on providing an answer that we miss what God may still be trying to teach us.

Then I look in the mirror, and the person looking back reminds me that there is still so much left for me to learn. So I guess wisdom is not necessarily reaching the place where I finally have life figured out. Maybe wisdom is reaching the place where I no longer need to pretend that I do.

The older I get, the less impressed I am with how much I know and the more aware I become of how much remains unknown.

That is not a failure of experience. That is what experience was supposed to teach me all along.

Yes, we should share what we have learned. We should teach when we have something worth teaching. We should help others avoid mistakes we have made any chance we get.

But we should never stop being students.

I have noticed that some of the greatest growth in my life begins when God allows what I thought I knew to no longer be enough. And maybe that is not God knocking me off the right track at all.

Maybe He is just reminding me that I was never supposed to stop being a student.

‘Well Rooted’ is written by Jeremy Elliott. Elliott owns a lawncare business and lives in the Great Bend area.