Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you (Deut 8:5)
My summer has been a marvelous journey of ups and downs. I spent my summer working as a camp counselor with a local children’s ministry at a nearby church. I have worked with this ministry as a camp counselor several times before, and I always walk away learning something new. This time, I intend to chronicle what I learned. But a brief disclaimer, even as I share my learnings I can’t really claim sainthood. I don’t have it all together in these areas; if anything, this summer I came to see how I fall short of the ideal. As a camp counselor I came face-to-face with my own impatience. Coming into the summer I felt like such a gentle and patient person. Well, I was wrong. My patience and gentleness hit their limits, limits that I didn’t know were there. Children are a sanctifying fire of their own, trust me. But I am sure the Lord will continue to work on such things in me.
Lesson number one: you are never too old for discipline…
I would like to thank junior camp (the 4-6 year olds) for teaching me this lesson. I believe God made this age cute to help keep us from giving full vent to our anger. Their blatant rebellion and open disobedience would warrant greater punitive measures if it wasn’t for their darn cuteness. How can I be angry with you when your cheeks always look like a never-ending game of chubby bunny and your eyes are so googly? Still, they know what they are doing.
As my junior campers and I were walking to the classroom one kid decided to throw his lunch box across the ground, resulting in me announcing a new rule: no more throwing your lunch box across the ground. Of course, even if the urge to throw their lunchbox had never come across their mind, suddenly the desire appeared simply because you said not to. It was like a light when off in this one kid’s head: she said not, so now I want to. That’s when junior decided to test me…he threw his lunch box. And I stopped and stared at him incredulously.
It wasn’t about the lunch box - forget the lunch box. And it wasn’t about the act of throwing the lunch box either, which in and of itself was innocent and not inherently evil. It was the fact that I had just said not to and he did! I felt my blood pressure rising. And it wasn’t this isolated incident that made me so upset. It was that they did stuff like this all the time. And every time I would think, What are you doing?! What an evil little child! Whoever said kids were innocent little creatures lied to society. Then God would pipe in to help me get a grip on reality, Adults are really not that different, they are just better at hiding it.
When I heard it, I knew what God was saying was true. We are just better at hiding our rebellion and disobedience. Children at that age are just so uncensored. It’s what makes them both hilarious and testing all at the same time. But as we all grow up, we learn that there is just some stuff you don’t say and some stuff you don’t do. We can censure our behavior without ever reforming what’s beneath it.
We learn not to hit the other children because that’s a bad thing, but we never necessarily learn what to do with the anger we feel towards others, which caused us to hit them in the first place. We just don’t hit them anymore because we learned it’s not socially acceptable. But outside of something not being socially acceptable, what motivation do we have? Why should we abstain from certain behaviors while making sure to carry out others? We reform our behavior to please society. But what about the heart? Which leads me to my first point: we are never actually too old to be disciplined. We may be better at censuring ourselves than the five year old, but something is still there. There’s a difference between reforming your behavior and reforming your heart.
