Movie Prompt: First and Second Things

I’ve been thinking a good deal about Surprised by Oxford and Carolyn Drake’s disappointment at her abandonment by her father. I often see in movies the heart wrenching dilemma faced by a parent where a child is terrified by an event that just happened, be it illness, violence, or some other trauma. The parent, desperate to allay the child’s fear, looks the child in the eye and tells them, “I will never let that happen to you. I will protect you.”

The child believes the parent and his fear is allayed. However, most dire circumstances are beyond control of the parent. To be specific, for example if the parent is the father, isn’t he setting himself up to do what only God can do? In other words in order to allay fear in the child (a good thing) he is setting himself up in place of God as if the father had control of all things and all circumstances.

So, at its heart, the parent’s assertion is at least an expression of hope rather than fact, but often it will prove to be an outright lie. Isn’t the parent simply setting the child up for the kind of deep disappointment and betrayal that Carolyn Drake felt? Can a well-meaning lie in the long run ever be better than the awful truth? So what is the alternative? Should the father tell the child he isn’t truly in control of all things? Should the father then say, “Sorry kiddo, this might also happen to you and there’s nothing I could do about it.”

I think this is a false dichotomy. Lying or being a stoic and telling your young child to face up to a hopeless perceived truth are not the only two alternatives.

Although I also do not control all outcomes, as a Christ Follower I realize or ought to realize that I and my child both a have a true father who has control of all things.

We will all face tragedy and death in this short life. It’s never too early to begin building trust in the father who truly loves us, has paid a great price to ransom us, and has the power to see us through all things (even death) and make them work out for our good and up-building. Of course if you don’t yet believe this, you are left with lying and stoicism as the only options until you encounter and embrace the creator and upholder of the universe.

In summary, although I began with a movie example in which parents make impossible claims to their children to allay their fears, I’m ultimately not writing of this because of a desire to give parental advice. The movie example of lying to children to allay fear is merely an example of a much broader tendency in which we substitute secondary things for primary (or first) things. C. S. Lewis put it this way:

“You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

C. S. Lewis. First and Second Things in The Collected Works of C. S. Lewis. Page 490.

Lewis had previously illustrated the principle with two examples:

“The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog keeping. The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication.”

C. S. Lewis. Ibid.

In the end, making sure I keep first things first, is a caution first and foremost for me.

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