This morning during our prayer time, one of my ComLife family felt led to pray about Halloween. A day that some can argue is innocent enough: kids in costumes, candy, tricks, treats. However, somewhere underneath lies a foundation that is more sinister than we care to acknowledge. It is a day that glorifies terror and darkness. I was in Party City a couple of weeks ago to pick up balloons for training camp. As I was waiting for my order to be placed, I walked around looking at the costumes, and saw a sign that read “Come visit our devil section”. A whole section of the store dedicated to the devil. Right next to the toddler bee and pumpkin costumes. I got a chill up my spine and sped out of their as fast as I could.
Ok, Ok. I can hear some of you now. Is it wrong to dress your child up as a bee or pumpkin? Of course not. As I am typing this, I just saw a kid dressed up like a tiger walking with his dad outside the window of the coffee shop I am at, and I couldn’t help but smile. Adorable. I guess the question I have to ask myself (and the Lord) is what am I glorifying by my actions? Or, better yet, what am I submitting to? This morning, we discussed what it meant to agree with darkness and with light, and how we don’t even realize which one we are agreeing with at times.
This blog is not meant to be a mainfesto preaching the evils of Halloween, but our prayer time got me thinking about the enemy and how his greatest victories in our lives are his most subtle victories. The ones that are not quite as easy to spot. Especially in the life of believers. We have our little check lists of wrong (aka agreeing with darkness). Lying-wrong. Got it. Drinking too much-bad. Not going to do that one. However, as I reflect on this past month, I recognize ways I have agreed with darkness that are much less overt. I have swung the pendulum from overwhelmed-ness to apathy in many parts of my life. Both are pretty immobilizing. I have missed opportunities to speak life and challenge others, because it took too much effort. I allowed frustration and disappointment to hang out for awhile, which turned into listlessness. Life started to be ordinary and routine. I became comfortable with maintaining, though the true desire in my heart is for greatness and the full life Jesus promises. I believe that my experience is just a reflection of of the enemy’s greatest tactic with the Body as a whole. If he can keep us bogged down in the daily grind, we become passionless, distracted and weary. The result is a weak and ineffective Bride. Score one for the dark side. This excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters describes how this works in our lives pretty accuratley.
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human
(Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realise how
enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a
patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One
day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning
to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a
moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning
to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by
argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck
instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and
suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy
presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never
quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than
lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said
“Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning”,
the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added
“Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind”,
he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the
battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a
No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I
had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas
might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books,
a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the
newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just
couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years
was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which
is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic”. He is
now safe in Our Father’s house. You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in
them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the
unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home
on him the ordinariness of things.
So, as I begin to recognize this in my life, I choose to agree with the light. To recognize where I am allowing the enemy to have his foothold, no matter how insignificant it may look. In this midst of this ordinary world, I declare that I serve an extraordinary God who invites me into an exciting journey in bringing His Kingdom to this earth.
This Halloween I turn away from darkness and run into His marvelous light. Church, will you join me?
