A Shared Experience is Not the Same Experience

A decade ago, in a memoir or a book on writing memoir, I read that no two children grow up in the same family. I am interested in this thought because there is a fifteen to twenty year gap between my youngest siblings and me.

I grew up in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia, in a two-parent household with parents at odds. My youngest siblings grew up in single parent households in New York and Florida. I grew up steeped in conservative fundamentalism, without a social security number, job, drivers license, the option of college, with whole decades where courtship, modesty, full-quiver theology, and fear of government overreach drove our lives. They grew up in public school, with the option of college, dating (and for two of them marrying their high school sweethearts), the option of drivers licenses and paying jobs. I grew up in one house until my late teens and flew in an airplane for the first time at 22. They grew up in multiple homes over multiple states, flying cross-country from a young age.

But more than all of those differences, I grew up with parents who were twenty years younger, twenty years less healed, twenty years more naive and immature. This says nothing about their character as individuals. We are all on a trajectory toward maturity and growth, healing and, hopefully, wholeness. At 40 today, I am twenty years removed from my 20 years in 2001. The reality that my siblings and I grew up in different families is just a reality, not a judgement.

There’s another side to that quote, thought, and this is that two of us may incubate in nearly the same circumstances, and still experience something differently. We may have belonged to the same church, which I loved and you hated. We may have gone to the same school, which I regard with suspicion and you with trust. We may have voted for the same person for president, and one may carry regrets and the other none. We may have been a part of the same circle of friends, and you may have felt loved, seen, cherished, and safe, where I did not. We may know the same person and one of us carries wounds from them and the other none.

Humility is recognizing that where you may have experienced good, someone else experienced bad. Where you experienced health, someone else experienced harm. Where you experienced healing, someone else experienced a wound. No one person or entity or organization or church or leader or teacher or writer or business is all good or all bad. We, from the first breaths we take, are in the world doing both good and bad, harm and healing, sin and righteousness. And most of us, to varying degrees, are doing what seems best to us in any single moment (Heb. 12).

We do not come into environments blank, tabula rasa, a clean slate. We come in marked by all the experiences we have had in all of our lives (and if the neuroscience is true—and I believe it is—marked by the experiences our parents and grandparents had, too), and every new experience builds on the old. This is part of why you may love a church and someone else may despise it. Or why you may think your family is the best and a sibling finds them intolerable. Or why you suffered in school while another excelled. And humility means being able to say, right out loud, that in the absence of a universal experience, difference experiences are a universal truth.

I just spent a few days with my oldest friend. We grew up neighbors with enough overlap in the stories of our families that when we met as young teens, we experienced the mysterious “Me too!” that brings all friends together. Almost every formative experience of our lives was shared in some way. We share many of the same memories, the same friends, the same cross-cultural experiences. But a few years ago we had a series of deep and good conversations where we both had to admit, our circumstances may have been the similar, but our experiences of those circumstances couldn’t have been more different. This realization was deeply painful for us because it meant facing that what seemed sweet to one, was bitter to the other, and what was a blip on the radar for one, was catastrophic for the other. Having these conversations was necessary, though, because otherwise we would engage as caricatures—distorted forms of the other with our own projections on them—and not as our true selves.

Jesus wants our true selves, the real us. He wants us to not pretend we made it through our lives unscathed by a specific brokenness and sadness and heartbreak and abuse. He wants us to bring the cocktail the enemy meant to drown us in, the whole story. Even if someone else had a different cocktail of experiences, it doesn’t mean ours don’t matter to him just as they are, in their wholeness.

Why? Because he wants to heal the real us, not the false us, not the mask we front to the world, the image of holding it together in devastating experiences or difficult environments. He wants the deepest parts of us, the core, our hearts. And he can’t do that if we pretend we’re just like everyone else or everyone else should see it just like us.

The gospel levels the ground on which we walk with Jesus, but it does not omit the story that brought us to him. The gospel is for everyone, but the route we take to it looks different for everyone. We who are in Him need to be able to say, “We may have shared an experience, but we do not share the same story. By God’s grace, one of us came through more healed and the other will find healing and wholeness through some other measure of God’s faithfulness in their life. But by his grace, he’ll do the work, so we can just take our hands off controlling the experiences of others, and let him do it.”

And then we step back and watch, knowing it says nothing about us, but everything about God’s completing work.

My Bean and me: twenty-five years of sharing life together, with all different experiences of life together.