‘Tis the season to find your inner child through the completely
acceptable tradition of dressing up as anything your heart desires, no matter
your age. It is also the season of willingly paying money to walk through a dark house
filled with goblins and clowns bearing chainsaws who jump out at you from
corners, giving you what feels like the beginning of a heart attack.
I cannot watch horror movies, and I am petrified of clowns. But for
some reason, I love walking through haunted houses. There is something
oddly exciting about knowing that at any second someone or something could jump
out in front of my face, causing me to scream in fear and cling to whomever is
nearest me at the moment.
Knowing it is completely fake, and each person causing me to
break out in a cold sweat is simply your average Joe with some clown makeup on, dispels any fears of actually being cut up into tiny pieces by the clowns with
the chainsaws. Besides, according to a study done by the University of Westminster, you can burn more than 100 calories just from
watching a horror film. Imagine how many you burn walking through a haunted
house.
Each year, Liberty University puts on Scaremare, a haunted walk through
creepy woods and an old house. Clowns, masked figures, insane people and
goblins terrorize those walking through. Thankfully, they are not allowed to
touch you, but they sure love getting up in your face or whispering in your
ear.
Always traveling in groups of about six or seven, this year a young
gentleman joined my group after losing his group, or so he told us. Walking
through the haunted house, he stayed in the front, pointing out to us any
hidden figures ready to pounce. He seemed to know exactly where to go through
the maze of hallways, and my friend and I began to speculate if he really lost
his group or if he worked for Scaremare. We questioned him, wondering if this
was all a plot to gain our trust before turning on us and terrifying us in some
way or another.
Denying our accusations with a smug little smile and a shake of his
head, he continued to lead us on, and we continued to follow him, not knowing
what else to do but accept the inevitable Mr. Hyde when the time came. After
all, we knew the whole thing to be fake.
Well, as it turned out, walking through haunted woods and a creepy old
house heightens paranoia because the poor kid really did just lose his group. I
wonder what was going through his head as we told him that, since we were
convinced he was a worker, we would not come save him if a clown dragged him
off into the woods in an attempt to frighten the innocent college students.
I think it’s interesting how often we do this in our everyday lives. In
today’s culture, we expect the worst. We find it a normalcy to hear about
people enduring persecution, someone getting shot in Baltimore or a patient
dying of cancer. Not to say we just shrug our shoulders and say “such is life,”
but it has become something that we expect in this day and age.
On the flip side of that, when something like a faith healing or the
pope washing the feet of prisoners occur, we look for another explanation. The
faith healing was probably a hoax, and the pope probably had ulterior motives
for his actions. Because we are so used to forgery and evil, it is difficult to
take off our rose dipped in poison colored glasses.
I wonder how often God just smiles and shakes his head at us when we
don’t believe that he is doing something wonderful in our lives because we are
too caught up in figuring out how the good is actually out to get us. I know I
am guilty of doing this. God will bless me with so many good things, and yet I
cannot enjoy it because I will wonder when the world will rip the rug out from
under my feet, causing me to fall on my face once again.
God desires to bless us and provide us with situations in life where we
are reminded of his grace and goodness. There is evil in this world, and unfortunately we do not need to look too hard to find it. But God is leading the way through
it, pointing out when to be strong against the attacks of the devil. We just
have to trust he is going to work out everything for our good. We have to stop
looking for excuses to not trust. We have to follow even when we don’t know
where he is leading, even when we don’t know what he is planning.
The beauty of this is we do not have to worry that he is going to turn
on us and then laugh as we recoil in fear. We can have absolute faith and trust
that he is on our side, and he will lead us out of the darkness and away
from the clowns hiding in corners. All we have to do is follow.
After his family approached him at the end of Scaremare, and our pride
took a slight blow with the realization that we were wrong the entire time, my
friend and I laughed at our paranoia. We knew how ridiculous we must have
sounded in the midst of all our accusations and distrust. If we had just
believed him from the start, it would have saved us a lot of added extra fear.
But then again, I guess we wouldn’t have burned as many calories.
