In His Love

We are starting to get into the thick of it with parenting a toddler as our son River is almost a year and a half now. He has entered the tantrum throwing stage! For us, what has worked best is giving him a time out for a minute, two minutes tops, in his crib. During his time alone, he can get out his emotions and when we take him out he is almost always cheery and the problem is resolved.

A friend the other day witnessed River throwing a tantrum and then how transformed he was after his short crib time out. She called it a "magical time out." One reason why I am a fan of this time out method is because it gives River a short period of space, both in time and place, to work through his emotions. This started me thinking about how it related to our relationship with God.

While as adults, we don't throw the same kind of tantrum that River does, we can often become upset in our own ways. God created us as emotional beings and it's important to recognize having emotions is not a bad thing, it's what we do with our emotions that become sinful. River needs a short period of time to process, and we need some too. Neither shutting down emotions or letting them run wild is beneficial to us or to our relationship with God.

The main reason I think the time out method works well for River is because he is so eager to be back with mom and/or dad. When we return to get him from his room, we have a short talk about why he was there and about how we can work on loving God and others better through how we act. He is always so happy when we pick him back up! What a beautiful picture of how our hearts should be after confession! So filled with joy to have the sin between us and God removed and to reunited with our Heavenly Father. So filled with joy that confession changes our heart in such a way that is "magical." Our burden or anger or whatever it may be, lifted from us.

I pray that would be my heart, and yours. In those moments when our anger, frustration or annoyance starts to rise, I pray we can recognize it, but quickly turn to repentance. Then, upon repentance, the joy of being reunited with God and the sin between us removed, would overwhelm and replace any and all of our previous feelings. Lord, help us to have a soft heart that desires to be reunited with You!