Discipline!
In August before Ray and I got married in December, he left Tennessee to start working on his master’s in American history at the University of Kentucky. He got involved with a church and became good friends with fellow graduate student Dr. John Peden DDS who was working on his periodontal specialty.
After we married in December, I joined Ray in Lexington. Together we enjoyed the friendship of John and many other undergraduate and graduate students at UK. John had been involved in an active campus ministry in Arizona before coming to UK and had many ideas to make the one at our church better. The church eventually hired him part-time to be the campus minister.
John Peden was a tall, red-headed, cushy teddy bear sort of guy. He was the only child of a successful grocery wholesale business owner in Chattanooga. John had many endearing idiosyncrasies. He was also the only person in the college group at church who had a good living. I was in awe of his beautifully-furnished townhouse with its glass-topped wrought-iron table and chairs and the what seemed to me enormous Norman Rockwell print, “Freedom of Speech.” When Ray and John were single buddies before we got married, Ray learned that sometimes when he didn’t get his laundry done, he would just go out and buy more socks–a real shock to this small town girl whose parents had always counted every penny.
Ray became a leader in the campus group and John thought of him as his right hand man. Ray completed his master’s degree a year after we married and began working on his doctorate. During that semester, he decided to end his graduate studies in history, move to Memphis, Tennessee, to get a master’s in New Testament, and become a campus minister.
Ray received a scholarship to help with his religious studies. However, John appreciated the help Ray had been to him and believed so strongly in what he had decided to do, that he offered to pay for all tuition and book expenses that the scholarship did not cover! What a wonderful blessing that was to us poor graduate students who, like our parents before us, were counting every penny. It meant even more when I couldn’t find a job in urban planning and had to take a low-paying, entry-level job in the Department of Education at what was then Memphis State University.
We loved and appreciated John Peden so much that when we had our first baby, we named him John for two people: the apostle John and John Peden. Many years later, after we moved to Tennessee, Dr. Peden was a practicing periodontist in Nashville, Tennessee and an active supporter of foreign missions. When I had a tooth that just wouldn’t behave itself, our dentist sent me to Nashville for oral surgery to be performed by his friend and ours, Dr. John Peden. Characteristically, John wouldn’t let us pay a dime. We miss John; he went home to be with His Lord several years ago.
We saw one of John’s idiosyncrasies often when the campus ministry committee got together to make plans. When students didn’t cooperate as he thought they should or when something didn’t happen as fast as he thought it should, with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face, he would clench his fist, bend his elbow, and pull his arm up towards his chest, saying, “Discipline!” He didn’t mean that we should discipline the students; he meant that the students themselves should have “Discipline!”
Discipline is one of the hardest responsibilities that God gives to parents, but it is dear to His heart. As a loving Father, He disciplines his children. He expects us to do the same with ours.
Discipline is so many things. Discipline is training the heart of a child. Discipline has completed its purpose when a child does what is right because he knows what is right in his heart and his heart wants to do it.
Discipline is meaning what you say. It is saying, “Close the door,” and making sure the child closes the door. It is saying, “Finish fifteen problems,” and making sure the child finishes not thirteen or fourteen, but fifteen.
Discipline is teaching. Effective teachers use different ways of teaching in different settings, for different subjects, and for different students. Wise parents do likewise.
Wise discipline involves choosing carefully what you do require so that you don’t have so much to enforce. It also involves knowing what a child can do and not requiring what just isn’t possible.
It is for discipline that you endure;
God deals with you as with sons;
for what son is there
whom his father does not discipline?
Hebrews 12:7
And what child is there whom his mother does not discipline?
A foolish son is a grief to his father
And bitterness to her who bore him.
Proverbs 17:25
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