Lessons About the Father

Parenting is such a rich mine from which to draw insights about our relationship with God. Let me offer a recent example, and for privacy's sake I'm going to blur a few details, which aren't important anyway as they are subordinate in this story to the larger point about how God wants us to be.

I had caught one of my kids in a lie, and was gently but firmly confronting them about it. At one point they blurted out, "just punish me!" But I persisted. I explained that sometimes punishment is the way we learn our lesson, but sometimes when we are punished without thinking through just why we are being punished, we don't learn our lesson.

So we continued to talk, until we are able to break through from what bad deed had been done to what the thought process was behind why it had been done. Tears and hugs followed.  As did punishment, by the way.  But probably harder than the punishment was probing the deeper motivations for lying and the thought process that set that act into motion.

It is not lost on me that this is how we are with God all the time.  When we do something we know we're not supposed to do, most of us have enough of a conscience to realize it and feel bad.  The question is, do we want to be punished and then get on with our lives, or do we want the Great Physician to do real spiritual surgery, to diagnose and the root out that which is deep within us that is wrong that He can make right? 

O how often I cry out with the equivalent of "just punish me!" instead of subjecting myself to that kind of spiritual probing.  How little I actually want to change, to do better, to be better.  Truly how wayward are our hearts.  Yet how much and how lovingly does our Heavenly Father want otherwise.  How much He loves us, to discipline us and to instruct us.