Another Example of Everyday Evangelism

It must be Evangelism Week around here because today I got the chance to consider yet another example of everyday evangelism, this one from my own family.

Click through to read all about it!


My son Derek and I have a wonderful relationship.  He's smart, funny, adorable...much more than everything I ever could have imagined in a son.

BUT...

My son Derek is also bull-headed.

He doesn't really mean to be.  He just sees the world through his own eyes.  He has an ideal picture in mind for whatever activity he's doing at the moment.  He knows what he wants to do, where he wants to do it, how long it should take, how each step should go, and what the finished product should look like.  The world inside his head is wonderful...something I'm reminded of whenever I get a peek into it.  He does things that will puzzle you until he explains the logic behind them.  His actions may not be consistent with the rest of the world but they're always totally consistent with his internal picture.  "I was doing 'X' which required 'Y' and therefore I did act 'Z' even though act 'Z' seems totally Froot Loops to you."  This is how a four-year-old ends up with a peanut butter sandwich in his hair.

The problem, naturally, is that sometimes his plans, dreams, schemes, and internal ideals don't fit in with the rest of the world...particularly plans mom and dad have for him.  Acting out Act III of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in its entirety using his toy cars doesn't fly when mom says it's bath time instead.  This inevitably leads to conflict.

Now don't worry, we're not irresponsible parents.  In this scenario our boy will be taking a bath, not mimicking Dick Van Dyke dance steps with Lightning McQueen.  That's not in doubt.  The question is not who will win, but how to resolve the conflict between his ideals and external (in this case parental) expectations in a way that he can process and adapt to.

With Derek having just exited the "tyrannical threes" we've had a ton of practice in conflict resolution.  Here's something I've learned about my son:  he does not respond well to negative resolution methods.  Trust me, I spent at least 9 out of the 12 months in his three-year-old year yelling at him daily for something or other.

I don't mean that he doesn't like negative reinforcement like punishment or lecturing.  Who does?  I mean that he's a brick wall when you go negative.  Seriously.  He'll take the punishment and the yelling and he'll respond to it in the short term, doing exactly what you wanted.  But he hasn't learned squat. He's doing it because you're making him do it.  There will be no connection drawn between the punishment and his next potentially inflammatory act.  You get exactly what you're owed:  one instance of compliance in response to this exercise of your parental authority.  If you want compliance two hours from now you will have to punish again then.  No lessons will be carried over from now until then.  No freebies for you!

As you can imagine, this often drives mom and dad up a wall.  We're good people.  We try to live our lives reasonably, upholding values like kindness and charity and grace.  Most people like us!  And now our own son is turning us into wrinkle-infested, stress-filled parole officers.  After we carried him for nine months in our bodies (or at least half of us did) and fussed and worried over him as a baby and did all the things that were needful for him to grow into happy, healthy four-year-old...THIS is what we GET???  We're not pillars of light and justice for our family, we're the goons at Alcatraz.

I don't mean to make it sound like Derek is constantly bad.  He's not, actually.  In fact we probably have it pretty easy, as he's so self-directed and 90% of that self-direction takes him to great places and relieves us of the burden of having to hover over him.  We're lucky that way.  But there are times...  (sigh)

A few weeks ago was one of those times.  For some ungodly known-only-to-four-year-olds reason he was having a bad week.  Him mom was about to pull her hair out.  As we looked at each other through haggard, bloodshot eyes as he sat in his fourth timeout of the day I said, "Do you suppose I could keep my job if we just killed him?"  This was a very un-pastor-like utterance.  But I'm pretty sure God put the Fifth Commandment in the Bible because he wanted children to reach the age of five.

Careen responded with, "I'm going to make a behavior chart.  I want to track how often this is happening.  Maybe it'll give us a clue as to some pattern or something."  So she did.  She put up a piece of paper dividing the day into six periods.  Each time period had a box for a smiley face and a box for an "X".  Both she and Derek could see immediately when he'd been good or not and how often each occurred depending on how many smileys or X's there were.

That's when I remembered something.  Though our son responds like a thick-headed billy goat to negative reinforcement and punishment, he's a precious little lamb when you stroke him or compliment him or make him feel special.  Also his stubbornness has a good side.  Once he puts his mind to something he will not stop until his goal is reached.

Bing!  A light went on.

We had a few small toy cars in the closet we were saving for a birthday or something.  His birthday is in November.  We didn't think he'd make it that long unless something changed.  So we brought them out and put them in the glass cabinet in our living room.

The next morning when he got up we showed him his chart and let him see those cars inside the glass case.  We said if he could get smiley faces through the day then that night, after dinner but before bath time, he could earn a car.  We explained that kindness and respect and listening to your mom and dad got smiley faces while arguing or fits or not listening got X's.  He looked at us, set his jaw, and said, "I'm going to get the green one first."

It's been about three weeks now.  In all that time he's gotten exactly one X.  Not one per day...one period.  He has somehow morphed into this happy, bubbly kid who hugs me when I pick him up from school, who talks up a storm when we go shopping, who plays ever so nicely...he's just a joy!  Now I'm not naive enough to think we'll never have troubles again, but MAN it's nice to have our awesome boy back and MAN we rue all the time we wasted trying to do and teach things in a way that didn't fit our son.  We've always known his response patterns but we got stuck doing it our way, working against him instead of with him, poking at his weaknesses instead of bringing out his strengths.

Now, I can hear the chorus out there singing, "He's just doing it for the reward!  You should just make him listen to you!"  I know the tune intimately because that's what I believe too.  When I was a kid there were no cars behind glass, there was a belt making that "whoosh" sound as it was pulled out of belt loops.  That's how you learned to listen to your mom and dad.  But you know what?  I'm not sure my parents had fewer hair-pulling moments with me than we're having with Derek despite their approach to discipline.  That approach also has the potential for negative side effects just as the reward approach does.

In any case, the approach that works with Derek doesn't come naturally to me.  It's not how I was raised.  If I believed for an instant he was being better just to get toys the policy would stop immediately.  There's no way I'm raising my kid like that!  But he's not.  The behavior transformation is too complete and he's adopting way too many of the good habits.  The cars just represent his goal...the tangible sign for having a good relationship and making a positive change in his behavior and environment.  If he was just after the goodies it wouldn't last this long, it wouldn't be this deep, and he wouldn't have taken on the good behavior as his own.  He'd change back as soon as he had gotten what he wanted.  None of that has happened.

In the end Derek didn't really want a little toy car.  He wanted someone to understand how he processes life and to be able to speak to him in his language so he could get it.  He always wanted us to be happy with him.  He just needed us to be able to communicate what that meant in a way he could grasp and live up to.

This was the lesson for me.  I could have pushed my way until the cows came home--up to and including the most strident punishments I could devise--and all I would have gotten was temporary compliance.  He wouldn't have learned, nor been able to change because of my actions.  I could yell at him constantly and it wouldn't get through.  But five minutes of speaking his language was enough to transform him completely.

Believe me...it was hard for me to put that first car in the case.  Am I spoiling him?  Is this just bribery?  (Answer:  No.  Bribery is when you offer him something to stop bad behavior in progress, not when you set a goal for future good behavior.)  Am I being a bad parent?  It's funny how backwards you can get when you forget that a relationship is a two-way street and you have to value the other person.  I was worried about being a bad parent at the exact moment I was taking the first step to being a much better one.

This is also a key lesson in evangelism.  You can't just go out and share God in your own language.  Otherwise the only people who will hear the message are people who already think just like you.  You have to take time to know who you're interacting with, hear what language they speak, and then translate God's love/grace/mercy into that language.  This may mean doing odd things, even some you consider backwards.  But it's the only way the message gets spread.  When in doubt, share God in a way that's going to touch them rather than insisting on the way that's easiest for you.

Somewhere along the line I got too busy parenting Derek and forgot I was also supposed to be practicing evangelism with him...sharing God's Spirit in my own family.  Then I stopped. I thought about who my son was.  I realized that God made him that way for a reason and started translating the goodness I was trying to teach him into his terms instead of insisting on my own.  Suddenly, miraculously, the joy in our family increased exponentially.

Derek's still happy as a clam, earning his little things, filling up his charts with nothing but smiles.  He loves those smiles as much as the cars now!  And he loves reaching a goal.  We're happy too, having rediscovered our wonderful boy.  From time to time I still have to lecture him.  And yes, I still punish him.  Dads still have to be dads, after all.  But those instances are minor and easily resolved.  My parenting works better now because I'm parenting him rather than parenting in the abstract.  I'm sacrificing a little bit of me (and the way I think things should be) to make a better him and in that sacrifice I have gained a hundredfold.  So has he.  Remembering some of my evangelism fundamentals turned a bull-headed dad and a bull-headed son into a great team.

Funny how that works.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)