Last night, we had our Annual Fall LIGHT Festival at the church; I’m the one who organizes the event each year. It’s a totally free event for the neighborhood, here in SouthEast Dallas. It’s designed to be a safe, secure place for families in our area to bring their kiddos for candy, games, and carnival-type rides. In Southeast Dallas, there really aren’t a lot of safe places to take kids anymore, so it’s very, very popular. I guestimate that we had over 2,500 people spin through in 3 hours. It really was a great, great event.
In other Halloween related news, my next door neighbor has a fake corpse hanging from her trees, and a few fake decapitated heads on her front porch. This year she setup a table, and had saws and various knives stuck into the fake body. It’s actually quite disgusting, and repulsive; but I know she would find this to be a compliment. I find it hard to explain such a thing to my children, so I try and divert their attention from the horror display. The neighbor across the street created graves in her front yard, bring in mounds of dirt and putting tombstones in front of them. They really get into the Deathly Holiday Spirit in my part of Texas.
I do get the fun of these things, and I know it’s not real. (At least I hope it’s not real….) I just always find it funny that people actually spend their time doing these things in their front yards. As a concerned neighbor I hope they take the bodies down before Christmas this year; last year the body stayed in the tree longer than the leaves.
Do you mind if I get pastoral for a moment? All this death and gore makes me think of a passage from the Bible found in the book of Hebrews, Chapter 11, in verses 37, 38, and 39.
Hebrews 11:37-39
They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, though commended through their faith . . .
A great many gruesome reads can be found in many different parts of the Bible about people suffering for the message of Christ. (And for more non-biblical stories of martyrdom, take a look at Foxe‘s Book of Martyrs.)
I just wonder sometimes if I may be in store for a sword-sponsored cutting into two….
God’s Undeserved Gift to the World: Christian Sufferers. This is a great article on this very topic, by one of my favorite writers, John Piper.
