Blessings but not motivated by them

When I was about to potty train my first child, I did all the research in order to find the best strategies and methods.

I wanted to do it right the first time and get her trained as quickly as possible!

To my surprise, all of the latest research said to NOT do rewards or sticker charts because that gets the kids dependent on the outside rewards, instead of getting them intrinsically motivated to use the toilet.

It made sense though, and I moved forward with training my daughter without any immediate rewards or prizes, other than my verbal praise.

To be honest, she trained herself very quickly and caught on like a champ, although there were certainly plenty of accidents along the way.

But I was filled with such pride for her that I wanted to get her a new stuffed animal as a reward.

I remembered the warning about extrinsic motivation, but I also felt that I really wanted to give this to her.

I gave her a gift, she was super excited, and it didn’t affect her bathroom journey at all.

Now to make the weird comparison between potty training and our gospel progression.

I know that God doesn’t want us dependent on immediate blessings in order to have us keep His loving commandments.

He doesn’t want us reading our scriptures and then assuming everything will go perfectly that day, or saying a prayer asking for more patience and then immediately getting it.

He wants us to obey out of our love and devotion to Him, to be intrinsically motivated.

Job certainly learned this lesson.

But Job also learned another important lesson about the nature of God.

In Job 42:12, we read:

“So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning”.

God still wants to bless us because He loves us so much.

We don’t need to be motivated only by the blessings, hoping we’ll get another sticker on the eternal sticker chart.

But our loving Heavenly Father will always give us more than enough blessings to make up for anything we have lost, even if it means waiting until the next life.

Happy Studying!

-Cali Black