What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?
Much of what we resent in our youth is simply love wearing a sterner face.
In my younger years I mistook discipline for a cage. A long career in law and government — and a deepening faith — taught me otherwise. The forms, the safeguards, the patient corrections we resist are not obstacles to a good life. They are its scaffolding.
A reflection on the disciplines we grow to love, and why true wisdom so often arrives only “later on.”
The Discipline I Once Resented
A reflection on the writing prompt: “What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?”
There was a season in my youth when I was certain that freedom meant the absence of restraint. Rules were walls. Discipline was a burden that older people had invented to spoil the lightness of being young. I resented correction. I chafed against structure. To be told no, to be made to wait, to be held to a standard I had not chosen for myself — each felt like a small injustice, the petty tyranny of those who had surely forgotten what it was to be free.
I loved the open road and hated the fence that ran beside it. What I had not yet understood was that the fence is often the only reason the road is safe to walk at all.
Today I love the very thing I once despised. I have come to treasure discipline — not as a cage, but as the quiet architecture that keeps a life standing upright when feeling alone would let it fall. The early rising I once dreaded, the order I once mocked, the patient correction I once resented — these, I now see, were never my enemies. They were the unglamorous friends who were trying to make something of me while I was busy resisting them.
The Wisdom That Waited for Me
Scripture had named this long before I was ready to hear it.
“My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline, and do not resent his rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.” — Proverbs 3:11–12
I read those words many times in my younger years and understood nothing of them. I heard the word discipline and thought only of punishment. I had not yet learned that, in the language of faith, discipline is not the opposite of love — it is one of love’s truest expressions.
The Letter to the Hebrews puts it with even greater tenderness:
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” — Hebrews 12:11
Later on. Those two small words hold the whole secret. Discipline rarely feels like a gift in the moment it is given. Its kindness is revealed only afterward, in the steadiness it leaves behind.
And the psalmist, astonishingly, could say of the law itself:
“Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.” — Psalm 119:97
As a young man I would have found such a sentence incomprehensible. Who could love a law? Now I understand him perfectly. He was not in love with restriction. He was in love with the One whose wisdom the law revealed.
What a Life in Law Taught Me
I spent the greater part of my working life in government service, handling legal matters, and that experience deepened the lessons that faith had already begun to teach me.
For there is a particular truth that those who labour within institutions come to know in their bones: what looks from the outside like mere procedure is, in fact, the scaffolding of justice.
The forms, the safeguards, the patient observance of due process — these are not obstacles to fairness placed in its way. They are fairness, made visible and made accountable. Remove them, and justice does not become freer; it becomes the whim of whoever holds power that day. The same hand that resented the rule in youth came, in the fullness of years, to draft rules, to defend them, and to revere the discipline they embody. I learned that the most humane thing a society can offer the vulnerable is not the absence of rules but the faithful keeping of good ones.
It is the same lesson, only written in a different script. The commandments of God are not the cold constraints of a distant lawgiver. They are the loving fences of a Father who can see the cliffs that we cannot. He does not say no to diminish us. He says it the way any parent says it to a child wandering too near the edge — because He intends for us to live.
The Invitation
Perhaps you, too, can name something you once resisted and now could not live without. A habit. A boundary. A correction that wounded your pride and saved your life. A discipline you fought, until one day you noticed it had quietly become the very thing holding you together.
If so, you have learned what the years are forever trying to teach us: that much of what we resent in our youth is simply love wearing a sterner face. The fence was never there to imprison us. It was there so that we might walk the road in safety — and walk it all the way home.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 30 June 2026
Johnbritto Kurusumuthu
Founder
RISE & INSPIRE
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