THIS is halloween

I was walking into Walmart yesterday with my oldest son (yes, I still go there) and we saw peeking out of the back of a car/van/truck/vehicle with a hatchback (what are those things anyway) what looked to be a dead bloody forearm and hand. Isn't that funny? Amber alerts about missing children, horrible months long searches for bodies, and we think a dead hand sticking out the back of a vehicle is a fun joke.

"THIS is halloween," I said to my son.

An hour later we were in a grocery store and there standing by the self check out lane was a lifesized cardboard cut out of what was meant to be a demonized woman. She looked frightening and sick and terrible.

I said, "THAT is halloween."

We can eat candy every day. We can dress up in costumes as often as we like. Halloween isn't dressing up, and halloween isn't eating candy.

Halloween is fear, murder, violence and death.

Look around. Tombstones, dead rotten hands sticking up out of the ground, pretend bloody knives sticking out of someone's back or head, fake corpses hanging from trees, this is what we accept at this time of year. My children received a fun cookbook with recipes for food that looks like fingers that have been cut off.

Why?

Skeletons, ghosts, vampires, witches - none of these things are cute.

I have a rule in my house that we do not pretend to be evil. Not in games, not on the Wii, and certainly not on halloween. It glorifies the sin. It teases the lowest part of our flesh into thinking there is something we are missing out on by doing right.

If there were no God, no devil, no supernatural realm, I still think halloween would be sick and wrong. But there is a God, and there is a real devil, and halloween is a day in which the latter revels.

Death, dismemberment, demon possession, seduction, fear, violence, murder . . . these are things celebrated on that day. This is halloween.




So what do we do? What should we do? As Christians, or even as people who do not love darkness, what can we possibly do?

I have two possible plans:

Plan A: get to a local house of prayer, and just pray and worship all day, fasting sugar.

Plan B: still fasting sugar, and worshipping and praying all day at our house, string lights all over the front of the house and give out flashlights with cards made by my kids saying things like, "Jesus is real so you don't have to be afraid."

Not sure what we will do, but whatever it is, I hope very much to punch holes in the darkness, not just accept it, and certainly not join it. I don't celebrate planting, or spring, or winter, or summer, I see no reason to have a halloween party and pretend like it is a celebration of fall or the harvest. Let's be honest with ourselves and take some ground. There is a battle, whether we acknowledge it or not.

A tree is known by its fruit, and the companion of fools will suffer harm. The fruit of what our culture does on October 31 is death and fear, not to mention gluttony. The enemy knows what that day is, but He Who is in us is greater than he. We have authority to cast out demons, heal the sick and raise the dead.

Don't join 'em. Beat 'em!