Fear at a 7-year-old's birthday party

Ok, so I'm not writing about the abundance of pink frills, girly squeals and kids tripping out on food colouring.  Although these are pretty fearsome things, they were in moderation at Eldest's birthday last week.  (And in the case of the food colouring, completely eliminated due to the brilliance of my wife and some strategically placed blueberry skins and raspberry jam).  No, the chilling topic today is the far more prosaic habit of children to try to scare themselves silly with ghost stories.

There are 0 ghosts in this picture.

We recently had four 7-year-olds and one 5-year-old huddled together in the darkened bedroom, with only a torch for protection, persuading each other that if they looked just right, they could see an eyelash.  That's right, THE EYELASH GHOST IS COMING!  Five little girls come pelting out of the bedroom, clutching at my legs for protection from disembodied optical follicles.  


"There's a ghost in my bedroom, Dad!  Friend#1 saw it.  It's real."
"Darling, there are no ghosts in this house, we don't let them in here.  Now what do you want on your pizza?"
"But it spoke to Friend#2, Dad.  I'm scared."


7-year-olds are really persistent.  So of course I exorcised the ghost as any good Dad would - turned on the lights, confiscated the torch, told the girls that ghosts weren't real and to come to the table and eat some dinner.  (I suppose I could've got my wife's eyelash curler and fought the ghost valiantly with that, but as the idea has only just occurred to me, I'm three days late with that bit of parenting brilliance.  Feel free to use it yourself if you haven't yet had your brush with 7-year-old eyelash ghosts.)


The whole incident would have passed with nothing more than a roll of the eyes if it hadn't been for the persistence of my daughters' fears after Friends#1, #2 and #3 had all left.  Suddenly we don't want to go to bed, because the ghost is in the room.  We don't want Dad to leave the room, because of the ghost.  What to do?


Plan 1.1, as usual, is: raise voice, issue ultimatum, and think up some suitably fearful consequence for disobedience (gotta be pretty big to compete with ghost-fear!).  Then I remember that I'm trying to wean myself off plan 1.1 - it just takes so long to do the job, and produces too much bad-parent-guilt.  So I try the newfangled plan 2.0.  It's hardly even out of the box, and I definitely didn't read the instruction manual, so I'm winging it.


"You know there's no such thing as ghosts, don't you?"
"But Friend#1 said she saw it."
"There are no ghosts.  I know, because they're not in the bible.  People think that a ghost is a dead person who has come back.   The bible says that when we die, with either go to be with Jesus if we love him (like you and me), or we go to hell if we didn't.  The people who go to be with Jesus stay there, and the bible also says that the people who go to hell can't get out of there.  So you see there's no way a ghost could come back to be here - they're all either with Jesus or in hell!"
(Brilliant!  This plan is working beautifully already!)


"But Friend#1 saw one!"
(Aha, I think, mistakes and misperceptions... )  "Whatever she thought she saw, it couldn't be a ghost, because they're either in hell or with Jesus."  (Quick, what else could it have been?)  "You know how God created angels, and some of them went bad like satan, well there are demons.  They're real."  (Uh, oh - this isn't going so well - from ghosts, which are a bit weird-scary, to demons which are, well, demonic.)
My poor scared little 5-year-old doesn't have any words left - just great big blue eyes.
"Here, lets read this promise that Jesus made" and so we read together from John 6:37-40.  We talk about how Jesus beat satan and demons, and that we now don't need to fear them because He keeps us safe.  We talk about how he promises never to let us go or lose us.  We sing the Colin Buchanan version of those verses.  And she settles down to sleep.  There is power in the word of God.


Epilogue
Driving last night in the car, the ghost theme came up again.  5-year-old protests: "There are no ghosts.  They're all in hell". 


Well, near enough.