This past weekend, I had the incredible opportunity to spend a couple days with several of my friends whom I had previously only met online. We’ve been friends for almost ten years, and we wanted to meet each other in person. So we all converged on the Disney resort at Hilton Head, and we had a wonderful time.
One of the things some of us did was take a walk on the beach to enjoy the beautiful scenery and look for seashells. We didn’t find many shells—it was the wrong time of day—but we enjoyed peering into the sand in search of just that perfect shell.
Some of the shells I found appeared perfect because they were partially buried in the sand. But when I picked them up, I discovered that they were broken. I tossed those back to the ground and kept looking. When I found a perfect one, I rinsed it off in the ocean and put it in my pocket—and then kept looking for more.
In the same way I looked for those shells, you and I need to look for the great things our children do. We need to be willing to search through all the things our children do wrong until we find something they’re doing right, and then we need to keep looking for even more things they’re doing right.
Yes, we need to correct and discipline our children when they’re sinned, and when they’ve made a simple mistake, we need to correct that too. That’s not wrong. What’s wrong is when we focus on the negatives to the exclusion of the positives. We put all our energy into fixing the broken shells rather than rejoicing in the ones that are unbroken.
Our children’s behavior is like that beach. It’s full of shells (actions). Some are desirable, and some are undesirable. When we find an action that needs correcting, it’s okay to stop and do that. But then we need to toss it aside and go back to looking for the good things they’ve done.
You and I as moms love it when the important people in our lives notice things we’ve done well. We wouldn’t want them to harp on the negatives while ignoring everything we do right. Yet too often, that’s what we do to our kids. We take the unbroken shells for granted and spend all our time trying to convince our children to remedy the broken ones.
How discouraged or even angry our children must get sometimes, when all they hear about is the things they’ve done wrong! Harping on their sins and mistakes is one easy way to provoke them, something the Bible tells us we’re not supposed to do.
What difference would it make in our homes if we spent as much time looking for what our children do right and rejoicing in those things as we do concentrating on the negative? Would our children be more encouraged? Would we?
Why not try it and find out?
Ephesians 6:4—Fathers (and mothers), do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (ESV; parentheses added)