INTRODUCTION
Perhaps you have seen the film: “The gods must be crazy!” a movie shot in South Africa in 1980 the story line began with a family of natives that stumbled at an empty coke bottle. The villagers began to fight over the strange object. Hence a decision must be taken quickly, the once enjoyed peace is gone over a misplaced priority of accepting the bottle, the fascination about, and the quest to unravel the “mystery” behind this strange material plunged Nixau the hero and his children into a search to the end of the world. He crossed roads with Marius Weyers a bumbling scientist and a band of guerrillas who takes a school teacher Sandra Prinsioo and her class hostage. Along the line the event turned out to be a scattered family that was searching for its member, the result was adventurous encounters and a happy end!
For some of us our misplaced priority may not end very well. Whatever you make your priority today can either make you or mare you. In this article therefore we shall look at the effect of a misplaced priority for your future. The method shall be expository, comparative, analytic and evaluative in nature. This will enable us to understand the danger embedded in a wrong choice. Expository here will mean a clear understanding of some key concepts. Analytical entails a systematic and comprehensive elucidation of various related issues. Comparatively we shall examine our choices with the plan of God and lastly, evaluative means a possible way forward or after a careful examination of the issues, in the essay possible solutions or recommendations will be made. To conscientiously realize this, we shall anchor our discussion on conceptual analysis.
What is PRIORITIZATION?
As a principle, it means doing 'first things first;’ As a process, it means evaluating a group of items and ranking them in their order of importance or urgency. Have you ever started prioritizing your time, relationships, and money in a God-honouring way, only to have those new priorities begin to slip away years, months, and even weeks later? Thus, we need to determine the sets (and sequence) of things that should be done on our lists to deliver the most value at each point in time, given our constraints. If we break this statement down, a core group of questions then need to be answered:
How can we know what’s valuable? How valuable is it? Valuable to whom?
How can we define the set of things that should go together in a plan? How should we sequence those plans?
How can we get the necessary resources to follow through?
How can we know if our assumptions are right? Are we on the right track? Are we really delivering value? Could we do any better?
For many of us, our priorities seem to have a way of becoming less and less important over a period. So, what is it that keeps pulling at us and causes our priorities to get out of whack?
MISPLACED PRIORITY
Misplacing priority is simply subjecting important things at wrong places, times and events. Many youths have made or are in this mistake of priority misplacement Everyone has his/her priority and the way we attend to them matters a lot; since priority is that which you think is more important than the other things and should be dealt with first; since it tends to improve our standards. To chase a misplaced priority means to go after that which is not of any value to us with reasons that are null. In many cases, you hear people say; “I cannot help the situation” we close every possible door for creativity and innovation and even restrict our possibilities before our environment restrict us, and other times we hear stories like; “I got pregnant because I needed money to finish my education”. All of theses we hear daily and we are left with no other choice but to ask “what is happening to our youths”, where has the culture of making the right choice gone to? Do we now lack priorities or what?
In a bid to meet with our priorities we tend to miss the step, probably because of our youthful age. Have you ever ask yourselves, why the youth of the so called 21st century make the wrong decisions in their order of precedence, most of us feel that at the age we have attained all we need is merry and have fun, we feel we are beyond corrections and fail to make proper future plan.
CAUSES OF MISPLACED PRIORITY
Some of the things which cause misplacement of priority among youths could be laziness, fear, cynicism, bad habits, arrogance, and misplacement of faith with reason and reason with faith or superstitious beliefs. Nevertheless, Ratio fidei illustrate; Reason should rather be illuminated by faith. This is evident in Immanuel Kant’s Ethics, in his theory of command. This basically teaches that an action, behaviour or conduct is good, bad, obligatory, permissible or impermissible simply because God wills it or commands it to be so, and evil or bad because it is forbidden by God. Many a time, we make decisions irrationally with the notion that God wills it. Fear of the unknown makes us lose hope and delve into priority misplacement. Once we embrace fear, we lose our freedom. Juan Arias Edition would say: “I am free when my voice contributes to shaping the course of history. I am free when I continue to proclaim my right to freedom even from behind prison bars. I am free when I go on saying No* to oppression even with a gun at my head. I am free whenever I defend with conviction and with risk to myself the freedom of others. I am free when they strike me in face for defending the truth that freedom is God and that he condemns anyone who rides roughshod over or abuses the freedom of even the single person. I am free when nobody and nothing tries to take the place of my conscience which is the creator’s final word in me.” Habits that help us to become the best version of ourselves are beautiful things. Good habits effortlessly defeat resistance. Everything bad is a distortion of something good. Habits perform a massive impact on us. For better or for worse they shape our destiny.
Jesus says there’s a singular root cause of misplaced priorities. And that problem is “materialism.”
What is materialism?
It has little or nothing to do with what you have. It’s a disease of the rich and poor and everyone in between. Materialism is a condition of the heart; where we’re trusting or even believing that the outward props of things, money, status and power that they provide have the ability to achieve for us inward peace, happiness and satisfaction in life. I must warn that material things are not evil in and of themselves. For instance, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a nice car or even having lots of money. We just aren’t supposed to put our hope or trust in those things. If there’s one verse that helps one on all financial issues in life, it’s this verse written by the Apostle Paul: Command them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share with others. (1 Tim 6:18) In Matthew 6, Jesus warns us about materialism and teaches us how to get to its root so that we can get to the root of our own misplaced priorities.
In this way they will store up for themselves a treasure which will be a solid foundation for the future. And then they will be able to win the life which is true life. (v. 19)
The battle with our priorities boils down to this: Either we have faith in God and in His promises or we have faith in things and money and in their power to deliver in our life. Although we can have both material possessions and God, we can only serve one.
What comes to mind is the realization that materialism has less to do with things or money and more to do with our heart and our faith in God. Now, perhaps one thinking, “This all sounds great, but how do you expect one to live in a material world without becoming materialistic? One still has to pay his bills, make house payments and buy food, right?” God knows that we need things such as food, clothing and housing, but He doesn’t want us to worry or fixate on them. Jesus tells us:
“This is why I tell you not to be worried about the food and drink you need in order to stay alive, or about clothes for your body. After all, isn’t life worth more than food? And isn’t the body worth more than clothes? Look at the birds: they do not sow seeds, gather a harvest and put it in barns; yet your Father in heaven takes care of them! Aren’t you worth much more than birds? Can any of you live a bit longer by worrying about it?” (Matthew 6:25-27)
In this passage, what Jesus is really saying to us is this: "Do you trust me to come through for you? Don’t you know that you’re significant and valuable to me? If you prioritize your life my way, I’m going to give the deepest things you long for in your heart because I love you."
A BANE FOR A SECURED FUTURE
When I was ten my grandmother usually tells me stories at moon lights; may God rest her soul. In one of such nights she cleared her throat and said “olanbiwoninu ‘as she likes to call me’ please do not forget today’s story it will guide you to happiness in life.” It was a story of a dog that is carrying a piece of bone, while crossing a river it sees a reflection of the bone in its mouth and wanting to grab it, the dog let’s go what it really has for what did not exist. What a misplaced priority. While reflecting on this topic her story came back to memory lane; the answer to why you are not happy is because like grandma’s dog you grab what does not exist and let go the real thing! You are not happy because you darken the absolute truth with relative, selfish little truths that do not satisfy your intellect. You seek your satisfaction in the possession of little false goods, letting the supreme good remain unreachable, covered and suffocated by your fake satisfaction, pleasures, and materialistic conquest.
According to Immanuel Kant; “Intuition without concept is blind”, that is, one who dreams without walking towards the realization of such dream is doomed. The ability to ring to fore our dreams can be very difficult in a society that does not encourage creativity and positive ideologies, a society that cares less for her citizens, where aspirations are easily frustrated and worst of all where people have to rely on their government for everything they need.
Immanuel Kant made it clear that we cannot settle for intuition, for we cannot be able to bring it to concept, many graduate and undergraduate today live in ideals; they have brilliant ideas but cannot conceptualize them, rather they take that which is of less important to them, leaving that which should take precedence, it like when the society cannot employ you, then you fold your hands and sit at home praying and asking God to give you a good job while sitting at home, you have done nothing to salvage the situation, instead you have succeeded in making the wrong choice.
There are so many unpleasant issues in our country today, all this are due to the fact that our scale of preference have been wrongly misplaced, the issue of insurgency typified by the boko haram nefarious activity and other moral decadence that characterize and pose threat to the future of youth and the society at large because the nation has misplaced her priority.
Our inability to design policies that would create opportunities among the youth have resulted to kidnapping, ritual killing, cyber crime, prostitution etc, which are daily occurrence in our society.
An important question to ask is; is the fault from the youth or the governments themselves? Obviously we do not expect the government to attend to all our needs and for this reason the youth result to all sort of act that do not speak well of them, all because they want to be different from other thereby loosing the whole thing. If we choose to look at it from the point of the government, one would see that the country pay more attention to the oil industry, which unfortunately is colonised by few very powerful and mega wealthy individuals, therefore the future is in jeopardy. In our society today, unemployment and corruption has become the bane for a secured future and this as evoked and provoked pertinent questions which insistently beg for answer, the aim of this question, however is to bring to fruition some practical solutions. Unless this is done, the vision for a bright future of the Nigerian youth with respect to employment and its necessary consequence of a better economy becomes merely illusory.
In a country like Nigeria today, in which bribery and corruption have become almost institutionalized, where corrupt individuals are deliberately placed in key posts to ensure that their masters will continue to sap the blood of the nation through their duplicity and the youths out of frustration run into error (Misplaced Priority).
The fact that you are not happy on account of the incongruence of your life; you want to combine God and money, material and spiritual, love and selfishness, religious and worldly life and then seek someone to blame for the discontent and emptiness you experience. Your heart is much bigger, your intelligence is much more farsighted, your will much more precious of your petty interests, that is the only reason that all you do cannot satisfy you and you in turn condemn yourself to be eternally discontent. While others are setting priority right in school you are busy attending parties, going to club and indulging in frivolities.
Happiness comes from within. You decide whether to be happy or unhappy. The old Latin: unisquisque faber fortunae suae (everyone is the maker of his own fortune) can easily be rendered as unisquisque faber felicitates suae (everyone is the maker of his own happiness). Our happiness or unhappiness cannot depend on causes outside our own self. You may try to blame everyone for your misery but I tell you, you are responsible for your state of unhappiness. Reflecting on Fr. Justin’s meditations in Faciamus Hominem, you cannot but realize that as image and likeness of God, you must enter into that divine plural to render your own image and likeness of God ever more perfect and more like the divine persons. For him the happiness you need is and can only be attained in the divine persons. Hence you must constantly strive to attain divine union with the most Holy Trinity in the Holy family of Jesus Mary and Joseph.
CONCLUSSION
Let us not give in to cynicism and arrogance which may lead us into misplacing our priorities. For once, we do, our future joy and happiness are gone. And evil sets in to frustrate us. Man is a rational being and this means that we all have ratio. Use your rationality in placing your priorities rightly – as you put your trust solely in God, so that even if you were to lose everything you would find all in Him. Jesus is always there to help us when we make sincere efforts to go to Him: He is the first and the Last, the beginning and the end, the Keeper of creation and Creator of all, Undefeatable and Manager of all times. He is always is and always will be, unmoved, unchanged, undefeated. He was bruised but brought healing; he was persecuted but brought freedom. He was dead but brings life, he was raised and brings power and reigns to bring peace. The world cannot understand him because he is Mysteria absolta, the armies can’t detect him, schools can’t explain him, our heroes could not do without him and the new age cannot replace him.
Always remind yourself that he is your light in time of rational darkness. His ways are right, his words eternal, his will unchanging and his mind is always on those who trust in Him. He is our Saviour, our God, our Joy, our Peace and comfort, our Lord, and he rules our life.
Allow him to rule over your priorities because he is the wisdom of the wise, the power of heroes, the rule of rules, leader of leader. He has promised to be with his own (those who trust in Him). Cling to him: He will never leave you, never forsake you, never mislead your priority, and never forget you. Grow stronger in the face of obstacles. God’s grace will not fail you (Inter Medium Montium Pertransibunt acquae!) you shall pass through the mountains!
When you are weak Christ will make you strong, when you are lost he is your way. When fear comes, he is your courage, when you are hurt he will heal you, when you are broken he will mend you. When you are blind by evil he will lead you to the truth. When you face persecution he will shield you. When you face trials he is with you. When you face depression he will comfort you.
When things go wrong, he will make them right. Regnare Christum Volumus: let us go to Christ and place rightly our misplaced priorities; it is never late to start all over again and to wake from our slumber. The God of good times is still God in the bad times. The God of the rich is the God of the poor. The God of the day is still God in the night. Don’t be afraid of the truth, even though the truth may mean your death. Action is worth nothing without prayer: prayer grows in value with sacrifice (St JoseMarie Escrva).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chip Ingram. Spiritual growth, Christian living, adversity. 2016.
Peter Scazzero. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. Thomas Nelson Publishers; 2011
Mary E.DeMuth. Author of Ordinary Mom, Extraordinary God, Authentic parenting in a postmodern culture, practical help for shaping your children’s hearts, minds, and souls. Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 2007.
William T. kirwan. Biblical Concepts for Christian Counseling, A case for integrating Psychology and Theology. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1984.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964
Robert Mugabe, Philosophy and African Experience: The Contributions of Kwasi Wiredi Ibadan: Hope
Publications, 1996
Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Populorum Progressio (March 26, 1967), n. 3.
Michael Schultheis et al, Our Best Kept Secret: The Heritage of Catholic Social Teaching London: CADOD, 1988
Dupuis Jacques ed. The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church Bangalore: Theological Publication, 2004
Website References:
Misplaced Priority My Spouse or My Job? ezinearticles.com › Relationships › Marriage
2007-11-16
The Gods must be Crazy: https://en.m.wikipedia/wiki/ The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy
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