Over the past 17 years, I have taught in many classrooms, worked with hundreds of students in small groups, ran retreats, and even had the opportunity to coach football. It was a wonderful time getting to work with and getting to observe teenagers. However, I noticed a common trend among the youth I worked with. I began to see how much of their self-worth and value they placed on how they thought they were perceived by others. It wasn’t just their peers, it was their teachers, their coaches, and even their parents. They saw love as a transactional thing. Love was something they could earn more of from being good, doing good things, or accomplishing something that someone else wanted them to accomplish.
I began to wonder if they felt the same way about God’s love. Did they believe that God’s love changed based on their failures and accomplishments? I began to bring this topic up in the classroom and in some of the small groups I worked with. Sure enough, a great majority of them believed that God loved them more when they were good and loved them less when they did bad. God was no longer the loving Father from the parable of the Prodigal Son who was watching and yearning for his child to return home. God was more like a coach who was obsessed with wins and losses or a bad teacher who focused only on the students that excelled in the class. What often happened is that when it came to their relationship with God, they felt that they had already fallen too far behind, and they would never be able to make up the lost ground. So, they gave up on it.
We believe in God’s unconditional love, we are not loved more when we are good, and we are not loved less when we are bad. It is good to praise our youth’s accomplishments, but it is even more important to show them real love when they fail. Here at Boys Town, we operate on a 4 to 1 praise to correction model. That means that our youth should hear 4 compliments, reassurances, and praises for each mistake or negative behavior that is addressed. That means they don’t have to earn their next compliment or moment of praise; they simply have to keep living. If they make 100 mistakes in day, they will have heard 400 positive things from the adults who work with them. Spiritually speaking, God is constantly reminding us of his love, even at our lowest moments. We never have to earn our way back into the Father’s house. Like the Prodigal Son, we simply have turn around to see a loving God who is waiting to welcome us home.
Sincerely,
Father Jeff Mollner
National Director of Mission and Spiritually
