By Charles Barnard
One day a father witnessed his young son throw a temper tantrum because he didn’t get his way. The father stopped what he was doing and went into the house and came back out with a small hammer and some nails. He told his son to follow him. He brought his son to the nice little play house he had built for him and said to his son, “You need to learn about anger. Every time you lose your temper and act the way you just did you are going to come out here and hammer twelve nails into the wall of your house.” The father showed him how to do that. The boy then began to hammer nails into the side of the wall. As you can imagine, he hit his thumb once and lost his temper and threw the hammer. Twelve more nails had to be hammered in. He hammered in thirty-six nails that day. The next two days it was twenty-four nails each day. It went back up to thirty-six the following day. After two weeks the boy finally went a day without having to hammer any nails. He proudly told his father.
The father praised him for his effort. He then took the boy outside and they looked at his playhouse. He asked his son, “How do you think your play house looks with all the nails in it?”
The son replied, “Ugly.”
“You think it would look better if we took those nails out?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Okay then. Let me show you how and each day you don’t act out when you feel angry you can remove twelve nails. Do you think that will do the trick?”
“Yes.”
After several days, the boy had removed all the nails, but something wasn’t quite right. When the boy’s father got home, the boy said to his father, “Dad, I finally removed the last nails, but…“ and the boy’s tears began to fall. “But, it doesn’t look the same.” The father picked his son up in his arms and carried him outside to the play house. The side of the house was riddled with ugly looking nail holes.
The father said to the boy, “You know son, when you react quickly to your anger you usually do or say things that hurt someone else. That hurt leaves scars like those holes in the wall.”
The boy asked his father, “Can I make the holes go away?”
The boy’s father smiled and said, “You can work at it. Unlike this building, with people you need to first offer to help make the holes go away and that begins by acknowledging your mistake and asking for forgiveness. It is up to the other person to accept your help or not, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying. Sometimes, son, it is good to feel angry like when you see someone getting picked on, but you need to think about the best way to respond and not respond without thinking. Let me show you what we can do to fix this play house.”
The boy and his father spent the evening replacing the wall of his playhouse and making it “new” again. When they were finished the boy asked his father, “How can I make a person new again dad?” The father bent down so he could look his son in the eye and said, “Son, you can’t. Only God and that person can, but you can help by asking for forgiveness, forgiving yourself, and loving the person you hurt. That is why it is so very important to be slow to anger in the first place. If you are slow to anger, it is much more likely that if you do react poorly the only nails available will be those tiny finishing nails that leave very small scars, but it is obviously much better to not have to drive any nails at all, isn’t it.”
What lesson can we learn from that parable?
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