Life as an experiment

For the sack of mental curiosity, think about life as a kind of Petri dish experience. We are placed into an environment and then we see what happens. The interesting part is that the environment itself may have a lot to do with the outcome. Put the same organism into different conditions and you can get very different results. Change the temperature, the nutrients, the competition, the toxins, or the available oxygen, and the outcome changes.

Maybe human beings aren’t all that different. We arrive in a particular family, culture, language, religion, economy, educational system, and set of relationships. We experience love, fear, encouragement, rejection, trauma, success, failure, beauty, suffering, and everything in between. All of it becomes part of the environment in which we grow.

We tend to look at a person and say, “That’s just who they are.” But, how much of who we become is actually the result of the interaction between the person and the environment. The culture around us is constantly feeding information into us. We absorb it, make sense of it, build patterns from it, and eventually those patterns become so familiar that we assume they are simply us.

That makes me wonder if life is less about being placed here to pass some kind of test and more about being placed here to discover what we can become.

Maybe the petri dish is part of the experiment.

Maybe the environment reveals us, shapes us, challenges us, and sometimes even forces us to question the programming we received from it. And perhaps that is where growth begins—not when we have all the answers, but when we finally become curious about the assumptions we’ve been living by.

The seed has potential, but the soil matters. The environment matters. What surrounds the seed influences what eventually grows.

Jesus used so much language about seeds, soil, fruit, growth, pruning, and harvest. He understood something we tend to forget: becoming is a process.

A better question isn’t, “Did I pass the test?” But, “What am I becoming in the environment I’ve been given?”