To punish or not to punish
I wish there were more answers to how to raise children. How hard is too hard? How soft is too soft? How much is too much?
Here is an interesting verse:
Deuteronomy 8:5
Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
Hmm… So how did God discipline?
Deuteronomy 8:1-4
Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years.
Moses recaps how the extra 40 years of wandering were because they hadn’t trusted God initially. Seems a harsh punishment?
I give my 3 year old a couple of minutes of time-out and that seems to do the trick most of the time. I also get him to clean up some of the messes he makes and tidy up his toys. But honestly, I have to provide a lot of help.
And so does God. Even in the punishment, God fed them with angel food and reinforced their clothes and improved their bodies to handle it. He made sure they had a miraculous supply of water follow them around and continued to show his presence with a ginormous cloud to cool them in the day and floating fire to warm them at night. Soft parenting?
God made clear boundaries of what is right and wrong but even when they were in the wrong, they were not far from His love.
I still don’t have all the answers but at least I know that I am not far from God’s love and neither is my son.
