Well fall is finally here and that always brings with it those beautiful colors and symbols that we all cherish and hang on to as a nation. Of course I am referring to blood, corpses and fear. Halloween is right around the corner, I know that because the moment you walk around the corner someone or something will be there to jump out and scare the crap out of you!
I guess I am a little sentimental but I recall when October ushered in the color of autumn leaves, gourds and Indian corn. Nowhere did we find it important to celebrate death, or did we?
If you think about it, and you probably didn’t but fear not, that’s why God invented me, so I could do the thinking for you, fall was the celebration of death. The beautiful; “fall colors” of the leaves is the result of the leaves passing away but going out in a blaze of glory..literally.
Halloween on the other hand celebrates skeletons and rotted corpses. Nowhere does it indicate that something good happened here and we should be optimistic. Yet with leaves there is this unique call back to the rainbow.
The Bible said that after the devastating flood that forever let the world know the consequences of sin and rebellion, God set a rainbow in the sky to tell humanity He would never again allow the world to be destroyed by flood, and so the rainbow not only gave us a promise, but hope that the sun is coming again soon.
Fall leaves are dead, but they die spectacularly, and when they do they are to remind us to fear not, I am coming back in the spring! Yes death is all around us, BUT, there is a resurrection day when all will be healed and reunited with their loved ones. As far as skeletons go, not so much. They remind us that death is final and that all that is left of our hopes and dreams and a life well lived is a fleshless carcass that has lost so much human dignity it is now considered a prop for the entertainment of the living.
Why does fear sell? Normally to be frightened is a bad thing so why spend 10 bucks at the theater to pay someone to scare us? Why attend a haunted house knowing full well you are going to be scared, unless it is because we know in the end we are safe. This is controlled fear that actually isn’t dangerous at all.
This is the feeling that we are avoiding the real evil of death by experiencing the horror without the actual results. By making light of it, we fool ourselves into believing we are somehow in control.
We’re not of course, God is. The good news is when we go knocking on His door we can expect more than a Snickers bar. Happy Halloween my friends, because as Christ followers we actually CAN laugh at death!