Emotional Intelligence

The boy couldn’t be more excited! He tells his parents and the smile on his face couldn’t be bigger. The day finally comes, and he is so nervous about the test he asks his mother to wait outside of the dojo in the car. The mother, like any good mom, agrees to the terms. The mother watches as her son comes out of the dojo, head down. Before she sees the tears coming down his face, she knows what has already taken place, failure.

The boy gets into the car, and he is in a rage. “I hate you! I'm never going back to Hapkido again! I am a loser! You should've never had let me go! You know I will never be good at it! And I'm not going to school tomorrow either!” He says, with total freak out in his voice. The mother reacts, out of instinct, “Stop screaming at me! How dare you talk to me this week! Stop it this instant! Wait until I tell your father how you're treating me!” A reasonable response, sure. The right response, no. She missed it, she missed the cues, she heard what the son was saying but she wasn’t listening to what he wasn’t saying. Of course, the boy doesn’t hate his mother. Of course, he loves her and Hapkido alike. But there is more underneath the hood. The mother (like all of us often do) was responding to the behavior and not the cause. She was worried about what he was doing and not what he was feeling. And it’s hard. It’s hard to understand the difference especially when our feelings are involved. Jeremiah 17:9 puts it this way, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” We spend so much time worrying about what we are doing, and not enough time looking at why we are doing it. This Sabbath I will be unpacking the difference between the two.

Connected to the Vine,

Youth Pastor Victor

Sermon: The Fall