Heading for the Light

What is it about the current passion for Halloween? As I look around my community, I notice that it’s become almost more celebratory than Christmas, orange lights spread across bushes and along rooflines, glowing goblins and witches hosting doorsteps, webs and black cats lining the alcove of someone’s entrance, and menacing organ recordings echoing darkly in the background. And the parties – they last until all hours of the night. It’s the glorification of the darker edges of life that makes me shudder. Each Halloween the tribute intensifies. It’s become a huge market, and it truly boggles my mind. And yes, I realize that my daughters’ participation in neighborhood trick-or-treating further patronizes the growing hysteria, but somehow I’ve justified it by dressing my girls in cheery princess costumes and steering widely clear of the spookier homes, looking for the homes that are brightly lit, where the pumpkins countenance happier expressions instead of visages of fear and dread.

But why the rising obsession for this increasingly sinister holiday? A teenager from church says she loves this day because it allows her to be someone different for just a day; she can escape the reality of her present existence momentarily. Why this desire to be someone else, to flee reality? Perhaps, it’s a prophetic intuition that we aren’t supposed to be this way; we were created for a greater purpose; we were created to be glorious creatures, ever reflecting the image of our supreme Creator. We have had the veil of obscurity removed so that we can brightly reflect His glory. It’s the hope that we find this greater purpose, this reflection of our Creator, that is key, the search for a perfect life, one unspoiled, untarnished by sin and corruption, a pure reality that only comes from knowing and bedding our faith in the only sinless Man to have ever lived. It only comes by living a life apart from the cavernous ruins of sin, the darker corners of existence shadowed by shame and guilt, a life only obtained by relinquishing all control to Him. So often this purpose is lost in the drive to magnify the darker side of Halloween, the desire to be closer to what this world is and what it has to offer.

Halloween is one day out of the year when we, as believers, have a chance to remind ourselves that we are foreigners, pilgrims on this earth. It is not our comfort zone; we aren’t meant to stay because we do not belong. Earth is not our home. We are heading for the Light.

And all of us have had that veil removed so that we can be mirrors that brightly reflect the glory of the Lord. And as the Spirit of the Lord works within us, we become more and more like Him and reflect His glory even more.
2 Corinthians 3:18 NLT