Last week, while attending STEM Camp, Hannah Grace and Addi Grace found themselves in a little bit of trouble.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting these two, Hannah Grace is our almost-7-going-on-17 year old daughter and Addi is Lance & Lauren’s 4 year old. They are both only children, but with the amount of time the
Hintons and Jones spend together, they act a little more like sisters.
One day at camp, the girls partnered up to build a marshmallow tower. It’s hard to get the full picture of what went down, but putting the pieces of the puzzle together, we know this:
The goal was to build a tower out of marshmallows.
Addi wanted to eat the marshmallows (who wouldn’t?)
Hannah Grace (in typical type A manner) wanted to build the best and tallest tower.
You can imagine where this is headed. After losing a few marshmallows to her snacking friend, Hannah Grace held all of the marshmallows over her head where Addi couldn’t reach them, and from what I can imagine (not so politely) told Addi to stop. So naturally, Addi gives HG a little kick in the leg. Things probably escalated at this point because HG is known to be a little (
ahem) dramatic and Addi ended up in time out.
That evening, Lauren and I sat in a hotel room in Atlanta trying to get all of the information we could via FaceTime because we both felt we had a lesson to teach.
From Hannah Grace’s point of view, Addi kicked her. She was not acknowledging her part of the story. She saw what Addi did as the “bad thing”. I tried to explain to her what she did wrong and how she could have avoided the situation, but all she could say was
“but Addi did”. She saw Addi’s offense as worse than her’s, so surely her’s didn’t count.
God reveals so much to me through Hannah Grace and parenting. I wanted so badly for her to accept her part in this and apologize - to repent.
This reminds me of Adam and Eve in the garden after they have done what they know they shouldn’t have done. God asks them “Have you eaten the fruit from the of the tree I commanded you not to eat?”
Gen. 3:11
Adams first response?
It was her, not me! She gave it to me, it’s her fault.
Then when the Lord asks Eve, “What have you done?”
Gen. 3:13
Her response?
It was the serpent - he tricked me.
In the end, God held them ALL accountable:
man, woman, and serpent.
You see this is not a 4 and 6 year old issue, this is a human issue. We’re all accountable for our own sin. It’s easy to look around and claim “Look what they did!”, but the reality is that in any disagreement, there is usually shared responsibility.
My encouragement is when faced with a disagreement, don’t place blame, but examine your own responsibility in the situation and extend grace - because we all need a little grace...
