Focusing on the Heart

Meltdowns
It hadn't happened in a while. In fact, I can't remember the last time I saw the four year old melt down. But melt down she did when I looked at her and said "he's younger than you. Just give him the toy and be a big girl."

It wasn't a tantrum or a fit. It wasn't screaming or fighting or pushing or pulling. It was big crocodile tears running down her face while her whole body went limp, and she just fell to the ground crying. Then her emotions took over and she began to yell "no, no, no, no". A real melt down.

My first reaction.
Focus on the unacceptable behavior and the consequences to that behavior. That seemed to work, until the next day when it happened again and then again and then again. Pretty soon, it was becoming a daily occurrence, and I just longed for the day when my four year old started acting like a big girl again.

Life consists of lots of meltdowns.
A situation happens, and we react badly to it. Maybe we yell. Maybe we curse. Maybe we throw adult tantrums. Maybe we give silent treatments. Maybe we gossip. There are a lot of ways adults react sinfully to circumstances. Usually we eventually realize our actions were a mistake and seek forgiveness. But before we know it, our behavior creeps back up again, and we are yelling, gossiping, cursing, and who knows what else all over again. The cycle of sin we just can't break.

But what if we took a different approach.
What if we looked at sin as a heart issue instead of a behavior issue? What if we looked at yelling as a lack of love in our hearts? What if we looked at gossip as a self-centered heart? What if we looked at frustrations as a lack of patience in our soul? Would that change anything? I think it might.

The solution
See my four year old didn't stop having melt downs because I continually disciplined her behavior. No, the meltdowns didn't stop until we started focusing on the selfishness in her heart. We made a chart with I Corinthians 13 written in it, and she started focusing on how to show love to others. We wrote down how she showed love all day long and rewarded her continually. We started focusing on putting godliness IN instead of just taking sinfulness OUT.

How do you apply this to your mentoring relationships?
Avoid the temptation to spend the next 6 months in your M&M relationship focusing on the sin you need to rid from your life. Identifying the sin in our life is easy; replacing that sin with godliness is the hard part. It is definitely important to identify the sin patterns in your life and confess that sin, but then focus on the heart issue behind that sin. Changing your heart is the only lasting way to change your behavior.

For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Matthew 12:34