Sins and Pink Elephants

There’s something universal about kids: how they try to manipulate their parents.

Take, for example, an incident with my younger daughter when she was about three. My husband had taken her with him to the swap meet one Sunday. She happened to see a vendor with a lot of stuffed animals, including a couple of quite desirable pink elephants.

Of course she wanted one.

Now, normally you’d think she would have asked her Daddy if he would please buy it for her. Nope. That’s not the way kids go about something like this.

Instead she informed him, “I don’t have a pink elephant.”

What, exactly, did she think her father would do? Drop to his knees, raise his hands to heaven, and cry out in utter agony, “Oh no! She doesn’t have a pink elephant! Whatever can we do?”

Well, my husband took the hint and bought her one.

When they arrived home, I took one glance at this new acquisition of hers, folded my arms across my chest, and stared my husband in the eye. “Sucker,” I told him. “You sucker.”

He merely shrugged. “What could I do? She didn’t have a pink elephant!”

What neither of us realized was that this stuffed animal was going to cause our daughter untold mental anguish. 

Because when she walked into her room she saw, to her horror, that she did already have a pink elephant—one she had totally forgotten about.

And to her mind, that turned her statement at the swap meet “I don’t have a pink elephant” into a lie.

Oh no!

She was terrified I would find out and punish her. First she tried hiding the older elephant. Then she tried giving it away to her sister, as if that would turn what she’d said back into the truth.

Finally she decided to wait until she was a grown-up before she confessed. Surely by that time any punishment would be far too late.

So I didn’t learn about any of this until she was eighteen.

Sometimes children can’t see beyond the “black and white” of an issue. They think any untruth is a lie and therefore a sin. This, apparently, was the stage my little girl had been at.

Some adults never seem to get out of this stage and are extremely judgmental of others when they tell an untruth. They can, in fact, jump all over you when you’ve only made an honest mistake. They seem to think God sits up on a cloud, grasping a bolt of lightning, waiting to zap you when something coming out of your mouth is contrary to reality.

Well, if every untruth is a lie, you sin when you make a mistake on a math test.

A lie must have an intent to deceive. No intent, no lie. Oh, it’s still an untruth, but not all untruths are sins. Some are just plain mistakes.

Nowadays my daughter is a teacher at a Catholic school.

The other day I Skyped with her. In the background, on her sofa, was the pink elephant her father has gotten her so long ago.

That pink elephant, I told her, was a perfect example she could use for her students to explain the difference between untruths and lies.

Maybe then her students won’t grow up into nasty adults who believe every untrue utterance is a sin.

After all, a “sin” like that is just as fictional as a pink elephant.