When my son Cole was 3 or 4, he threw tantrums at dinner on the regular. Our usually easygoing kid would blow his top over the most minor things and turn our family meal into chaos.  

Over and over, I’d him up and carry him to his room for a time-out, telling him he could come out when he calmed down.  Because in his fury, he was usually way too angry to actually stay in his room just because I told him to,  I’d often stand outside the door, holding it shut while he banged furiously, getting himself angrier and angrier until he wasn’t so much calmed down as wiped out.  Then we’d both head back downstairs to recoup what we could of failed family time.

These episodes weren’t my finest moment as a parent, but it took me a long time to realize it.  I think it was the book How to Really Love Your Child by Ross Campbell that finally prodded me into seeing what I was doing wrong. I didn’t agree with everything in the book, but one important piece that stuck with me was the importance of “filling your child’s love tank” every day. When a child acts out, Campbell said, consider first: Have I shown them my love today, through both physical touch and my active love and attention? Added to that, I remembered the commonsense questions the parents in ECFE  and the moms in La Leche League would ask each other whenever one of our littles was acting up:  Is he hungry?  Was she tired?  Fill that tank with food, rest, attention, and love, and 90 percent of the time, the problem will go away.  

As I thought about Cole’s tantrums, it suddenly became glaringly obvious: by six o’clock at night, especially with the limits I was putting on before meal snacks, he was past hungry. Having outgrown naps and after a busy day playing with the kids in my home daycare, he was almost always exhausted.  This, I reminded myself, was the child who would fall asleep at 4:30 and sleep through to the following morning.  So we adjusted meal time and loosened up on snacks–and the tantrums disappeared.

Twenty years later, I still think  about putting Cole through those traumatic timeouts though he’s long forgotten them.  This week, as I thought about the  Good Shepherd, the hired hand, and  the Godly Play question, “Who do you think you might be in the story?” I think I finally understood why that story has stayed with me for so long.  

The Godly Play Good Shepherd story combines Jesus’ parable with psalm 23. The Good Shepherd knows his sheep, and his sheep know him.  He provides them with food, water, and rest and protects them even in the darkest places.  The wolf, on the other hand, “scatters” and ‘snatches” the sheep, and the hired hand just gives up and runs off when things get tough.  

As I dealt with my tantrumming preschooler, I was the wolf in the story.  My sister once told me how my niece in her first weeks of kindergarten would throw herself to the ground in a full-on tantrum the minute she stepped off the school bus and saw her mom who, understanding her daughter’s pent-up emotions, just said, “You go girl.  Get it OUT!”  On the other hand, I snatched my hungry and tired boy away from the security of the family table where he was trusting us enough to let himself go. I scattered our comforting family circle, sending him off into exile that his exhausted body and mind could not understand.  

And today, when once or twice a year, I lose my temper with an upset, struggling student when my patience is spent, or when I watch videos of police officers barking orders at frightened drivers pulled over for minor offenses,  I see that same wolf.  Today’s letter from John asks, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”  That moment where it feels more important to control than to help one another is not a place where we live in  God’s love.

That said,  even though I need to be working continually to be more like the Good Shepherd and less like a wolf or hired hand, I’m glad that in this Godly Play story, I can also be one of the sheep. 

Psalm 23 describes our life in Christ is a journey, sheep with our shepherd.  As God’s people, we experience times of rest, where we are fed, and our thirsts are quenched.  We go through valleys of darkness.  This year has for sure been a mixture of all those things.  Throughout that journey, as John’s letter puts it, we try to do what pleases the One who is “greater than our hearts…and knows everything,” following his voice and abiding in his love by loving one another “just as he has commanded us.”    But we never stop going through those valleys and straying from the proper path.   

Through it all, though, there is the Good Shepherd: using his staff to guide us and his rod to prod us; calling us by name; setting a table that provides what we need for our most challenging encounters with others.  Notice the way Psalm 23 sets grassy meadows beside darkest valleys; blessings of oil in the presence of enemies.  In the parable, the Good Shepherd lays down his life where the careless hired hand runs from danger; the wolf scatters as the shepherd gathers; the sheep listen, and they stray.  In the original wording of Psalm 23, goodness and mercy don’t follow us all the days of our lives; they pursue us.  And we don’t dwell in the house of the Lord forever; a closer interpretation of the Greek is that we return to it.  Straying off the path is part of our human journey, but so is the enduring love of that Shepherd who never stops finding us wherever we are.

So if my actions toward my son were wolfish for a month or so, I think what mattered most in the end was the way that the Good Shepherd pursued me and prodded me to return to the right path, where I remembered to listen to the small, tired, ornery  sheep in my particular sheepfold.  And so may we all, not in impatient “word or speech,” but in resolute “truth and action,” fill one another’s love tanks.