Today is Halloween. It’s an interesting observation on the calendar – fun, quirky, complicated, mostly misunderstood, and often downright bizarre!

I’m not going to try to spell out the history of the holiday, or tell anyone how they should celebrate; I’m simply going to share a few impressions, and hopefully influence the way my readers think.

First, I think any excuse to celebrate anything at all is always a good move. Party? Eat? Hang out with friends? Get the community involved? Play dress-up? It’s all good.

Let’s renew our commitment to not only stand as witnesses to the power of goodness, and light, and life, but also to live as faithful practitioners of the Gospel of Love and Grace.

The point of Halloween, and what I believe needs to be the unifying and dominant value that runs as an undercurrent through everything we do today, is that it doesn’t matter what we run into – things living, things not alive; things dead, things undead; things we understand, things we don’t understand; things from this world, things from another world; things of spirit, things of flesh – we are going to be okay because we are children of the Living God, and God is the Lord of all.

Obviously, Halloween has taken on a life of its own, and most people don’t give much of a thought to the idea that there is nothing in all of creation that has any power over Children of the Living God. Or, as Paul expressed the idea on Romans 8:37-39:

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

BRUTALITY: What does bother me, and what I always try to discourage, is the practice of portraying brutality as entertaining, and enjoying graphic representations of torture, pain, and fear. If we pay any attention to the news – international and domestic –  we know that such horrors are very real, and already a part of daily life for far too many people in today’s world.

So enjoy your Halloween, and celebrate the freedom we have to live free from fear. But at the same time, let’s also be aware that we live in a world where evil is distressingly rampant, and renew our commitment to not only stand as witnesses to the power of goodness, and light, and life, but also to live as faithful practitioners of the Gospel of Love and Grace.

In love, and because of love – DEREK