What’s the Truth in Your Heart?

My ten-year-old son struggles with his emotions. It’s not constant, or even super predictable, but he’s almost guaranteed to have a meltdown if he’s tired and we mete out strong consequences for bad behavior. As he’s marching to his room, he’ll begin sobbing about how he’s a horrible person who can’t do anything right. It escalates from there. Worthless. Useless. A waste of air. No good to anyone.

It breaks my heart.

The first time this happened, my husband and I had no idea what to do. We couldn’t not punish him. He had to suffer consequences for his bad choices; that’s our job as parents! We reevaluated. Had we been too harsh? Did we say something poorly and imply that we felt this way about him? I tried to talk him down and soothe him, but ultimately, I don’t think I did much to help.

Not long after, it happened again. As I held and rocked him, I prayed that God would give me the words to speak truth into his heart. Truth that he would hear. Truth that he would receive. As he launched into his litany of self-deprecation, I quietly reminded him that what he was saying wasn’t the truth and supplied him with a phrase that is.

When he said he was a horrible person, I reminded him that he was a child of God, made in his image, planned and foreknown before the very beginning of the earth. When he said he couldn’t do anything right, I reminded him that I still make mistakes even at the ripe old age of more than forty, but that God doesn’t ask us to be perfect; he only asks us to be obedient. When he said he was worthless, I reminded him that he was so valuable to God that God sent Jesus. I reminded him that his father and I prize him beyond anything else in our lives.

When he exhausted himself, I asked if he truly believed the things he had said. He said no, but that sometimes it felt real. We talked about that for several minutes, trying to work out a plan to help him combat the lies Satan whispered in his ears when he was upset like this. Finally, I asked him, “What’s the truth in your heart?”

He paused for a minute, thinking, before answering, “That you love me, and Dad loves me, and God loves me. No matter what.”

Since then, we’ve had a few more meltdowns, but they’re easing off more quickly as I hold him and ask, “What’s the truth in your heart?” It helps him to re-center and focus on the truth he knows rather than the lies he feels.

Recently, having a bad day, I was sitting at my computer grumbling under my breath when my son plopped onto the chair next to me and asked what was wrong. I explained how it seemed like nothing I did was good enough and nobody cared anyway. He laid his head on my shoulder and said, “Mom, what’s the truth in your heart?”

It startled me. Here I’d been working up a good funk, complete with grumbling and feelings of injustice, and he took the wind right out of my sails. What was the truth in my heart? I thought back to the things I’d told him when I was quietly countering his litany of complaints. They all held true for me as well. They were all good reminders I needed to embrace.

This is a lesson I need for myself all too often. The lies Satan whispers feel true. They can hit us in the softest, most vulnerable places of our hearts, where past experiences seem to back them up. But they are not the truth.

Truth isn’t some squishy, negotiable thing that depends on our circumstances or feelings. When I ask myself or my son to identify heart truths, I’m not asking for “his truth” or “my truth.” Those are nebulous, wishy-washy ideas that rely too much on the changeable. What I need to remember, and what I want my son to remember, is capital T Truth. The kind that comes only from our heavenly Father.

The capital T truth is this: “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39 NIV).

Elizabeth Maddrey is an author of several contemporary Christian romance novels. She is also a wife, mother of two amazing boys, Awana Commander, and beloved daughter of the King. Though her PhD in Computer Science does little to help her succeed in any of those tasks, she owns her nerddom just the same. She blogs at elizabethmaddrey.com.

Photograph © Steve Malama, used with permission