Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-Fil-A restaurant, had his Florida home broken into and vandalized by two young girls last month, generating a hefty amount of damage. Instead of prosecuting them, the 87-year old Christian formulated a deal with the female vandal’s parents to discipline them with a writing assignment:
The girls must write “I will not vandalize other people’s property” 1,000 times. They are also banned from watching TV and playing video games and must read a good book.
New Smyrna Beach police told the Daytona Beach News-Journal the preteens broke into Cathy’s Florida home two weeks ago and sprayed fire extinguishers, threw eggs, and left water running in the kitchen.
What seemed to bother Cathy most about the crime were the ” bad words” scrawled throughout the residence. ”They upset me,” he told the News-Journal.” I will not repeat them, but they had something to do with sex.”
The elementary schoolers told a police investigator they were bored when they committed the crime sometime between July 11 and 15.
What a perfect example of Christian grace and mercy extended to these two young girls. And the girls, and their families included, should learn far more from this discipline than they would should they have been prosecuted. Of course, it’s highly probable the girls’ parents have administered little discipline in their young lives up to this point.
Properly disciplined young people, though far from perfect, know better than to vandalize property in order to cure boredom. When kids grow up undisciplined, they are unaware of where boundaries are drawn. They don’t know what is permitted and what is not. Breaking in to someone else’s house and vandalizing probably provided a short-term high for these girls. Disciplined children understand this is outside the confines of acceptable exploits and use their imagination, a faculty dulled by video games and TV, to find tolerable outlets of amusement or create new games within their boundaries.
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