The Joy of Discipline

Last week, our family took a much needed vacation to the beach. The hope was for the Man to catch up on sleep (a hot commodity when you have a job where your phone rings multiple times a night) and for all of us to get a change of scenery and some quality time together.

Naturally, I woke up at six every morning and squeezed in a couple runs. The Man informs me that waking up early on vacation is abnormal. But old habits die hard.

And for me, these habits born of hard fought discipline have brought a lot of joy.

On my second run, five miles along the shoreline, I was delighted to watch a pod of dolphins sliding in and out of the waves. Then, as I cooled down, our two youngest came out to join me, and we watched a flock of sandpipers puncturing the sand repeatedly with their beaks, admired a beautiful set of pristine sand dollars, and weighed the heavy solidity of a pair of sea snails in our palms.

None of it would’ve happened if I hadn’t trained my body to wake up early, if I hadn’t forced my muscles into submission, if I hadn’t struggled through those uncomfortable initial runs.

I started running with my dad when I was in high school. Five miles, three times a week, looping our neighborhood in a figure eight, up and down the side of a sloped hill, trying to beat the tropical heat. I can guarantee that my teenage self didn’t think it was worth the lost sleep. But if my forty-year-old dad could do it, I could too.

We ran, and he would tell me what he had learned in his quiet time or what he had read in the news. He kept up a running commentary (pun intended) so I could ignore the fact that I was dying and he was barely breathing hard. When I left for boarding school at fourteen, our runs became a fixture during school breaks, a time to see how I’d stretched and grown, a time to learn what I could from him while I had the chance. When I left for college, I would’ve given anything to have been able to come home and go for a run with my dad, so instead I looped the campus, hoping that if I ever made it back across the Pacific, I’d still be able to keep up with him, we’d still be able to have our time together.

I’m thirty-five now, and I’m still running. My father disciplined me well. I use the time while my feet carry my body to think and to pray, to meditate on what I’m learning and to consider what’s going on in the world. I’m waiting for the day when my kids want to do a little bit more than groan through the one mile loop of our neighborhood.

And I’m letting this hard-won discipline bring me joy.

Right now, I’m delighting in desert sunrises, coyote sightings, and the iridescent flash of hummingbird wings caught in the corner of my eye. I’m enjoying knowing that, for right now, my body is strong enough to care for my children, to keep up with their long legs and at least keep in sight of their boundless energy. Always, I’m thanking God that all those years ago, my dad helped discipline me to do something hard that has now brought me so much joy.

This is not a “suck it up and go run” post. Neither is it me telling you that running is the best thing ever and if you don’t go running, your life will be incomplete and worthless. No, running might not be the discipline you need.

But I guarantee there are disciplines that would bring you joy if you can stick with them through the struggle. So consider this just a gentle question for you as you look at your life: is there a hard discipline you need in your life that feels impossible or insignificant now but might turn out to bring you uncounted for joy in the future?

We discipline our children to sit with their math books and grammar exercises and science experiments so that their minds can grow and develop—so that later they can enjoy the benefits of well-trained minds that can understand and notice and appreciate the beautiful and the challenging and the hard. Where do we need to continue these disciplines for ourselves?

Is it training ourselves to reach for our Bibles as the first (or final) thing of our day? Is it choosing not to leave our dishes unwashed or our laundry unfolded? (Is it choosing to leave the dishes or the laundry in order to prioritize the more important human relationships?) Is it the discipline of 10 minutes of stretching or 10 minutes of kitchen dancing or 10 minutes of walking outside under an open sky? Is it the challenge of not interrupting (or not formulating an answer while pretending to be listening)?

There are so many small disciplines that we can choose and work on, so many that require constant training, consistent follow through. And often, we discount them, see them as worthless (or as too hard to tackle). We forget that follow through brings future joy.

And maybe that’s something worth thinking about. Maybe it’s something worth praying over. Maybe we have a good Father who disciplines those He loves, who has the hope of joy for us—if we can just trust that the discipline He has for us is for our good and not our destruction.

So the question is: is joy worth taking the risk of embracing discipline?

I’d lean towards yes.