12 Apr Toddler Discipline and the Heart of the Matter

Last week my baby girl turned two. TWO! Astounding yet I can’t even remember a time before she brightened our lives.

A few days shy of her second birthday, in the agony of waiting two minutes for toast, sweet baby girl looked me straight in the eye then swiped my beautifully crafted first cup of coffee all over Mimi’s favorite rug. Stunned, caffeine-deprived, and pretty mad, I sat there for a second, thinking, “What the heck am I supposed to do right now?” I frantically combed through the files in my brain, scrambling to love and logic her with a two-minute timeout.

After the requisite toddler meltdown, I went in to have a chat about consequences, trying, and mostly failing, to get at what was happening in her tiny two-year old heart. As I fumbled through explaining patience and respect, I kept thinking about how it’s her heart that matters. Her heart condition drives her behavior. The manifestation of rebellion will change over the years so the behavior doesn’t matter quite so much as what’s going on inside. The spiritual trumps the physical.

God’s been trying to teach me the same thing.

A few weeks ago, as my mentor was praying for me, she kept getting a question from the Lord for me to answer, “Natalie, is it better to give physical bread or spiritual bread?” I had been struggling with our financial situation (living with the ‘rents, waiting on commissions to grow), longing for a home, and really needing to trust God but my worries were running rampant.

The right answer to this question is clear: spiritual bread is better. But how do we get our hearts and emotions to align with the right answer? And if spiritual bread is better, why do we live in this painfully physical world, a world that requires physical bread all the time? This reality is one of the many things we hold in tension in our faith, the nows and not yets, the in the worlds but not of its.

I was struck again by this concept of spiritual bread in John 11:17-27. Jesus arrives to see Mary and Martha after Lazarus had been in his tomb for four days.

Martha goes out to meet him alone, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” Martha is looking for physical bread, for life to be restored to her brother’s flesh and blood.

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

Even in the midst of our pleas for physical bread, for healing, for the meeting of our needs, Jesus goes straight to the heart of the matter. We need to set our hearts and desires on him, we need spiritual bread more than we need physical bread.

We all know the rest of the story, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Mary and Martha receive their flesh and blood brother, their physical bread, but not before Jesus reorients Martha’s longing, focusing her heart.

It’s not that God doesn’t care about our physical bread, our needs, our wants, or our prayers for healing. In fact, a few verses later, Jesus demonstrates that he cares about our physical needs and that he enters into our suffering. “When Jesus saw her weeping … he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled … [and] Jesus wept” (John 11:33,35).

Yet even as Jesus mourns, he’s teaching her that she cannot set her heart on the outcome in the physical world. Physical bread cannot become her highest good, her ultimate pursuit. He has more for her: himself.

Jesus is trying to elevate her thinking, he’s trying to help her see her true need. “Man does not live by bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

We think we need what Jesus can give, but the truth is, we need only him.

This week, something truly terrible happened to a friend of a friend, the kind of thing that makes you sick to your stomach as a parent and terrified of being responsible for such delicate entrustments as our children.

We prayed for a miracle, for life, and it didn’t come. We asked for physical bread, and this time, for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, the answer was no. It’s horrific, it’s painful, and I’m still wrestling with God over why the answer was no.

But regardless of our physical circumstances on this side of eternity, whether we get our physical bread or we don’t, God knows what our hearts need and he provides it. We need to be reconciled to our Creator, we need his Word as bread for our souls. We need him.

We are flesh and blood, but fleeting. We are soul and spirit for eternity. The promise of Jesus is this, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

He asks us, “Do you believe this?”

Yes. Yes, I believe this.