This week is my least favorite time of the whole year. I really dislike Halloween and all that goes with it. Our family does not celebrate the "holiday" or trick-or-treat. You might be thinking it is because of my upbringing and the fact that my family didn't celebrate it either. While this is somewhat true, Luis, who had a very different upbringing than I, feels even more strongly against it. Mom and Dad taught me that there was nothing cute or fun about Halloween. As the neighborhood kids came to our doors dressed like ghosts, witches, and other hideous things, my parents would hand out candy along with a little note about Jesus. We would stay home that night, and always have an abundance of left over candy, much to our dentist's dismay. One of the moms down the road from us felt such pity for me, that she made her son that was in my class, give me a portion of his candy. (No wonder that kid didn't like me!). Those parents didn't share or even understand the conviction that my parents felt on the subject. We, as children, didn't always understand either, and merely saw it as "they got candy and we didn't". Now that I am a Christian parent, I find myself sharing those same convictions that my parents did. I have noticed how much the "church" has changed on the whole Halloween issue. More and more, the standards that used to draw distinct lines have been weakened and watered down until it has gotten to a point where it's getting difficult to tell the difference between the Christians and the non-Christians. The world has become more evil, even just in my short lifetime. The worst part is that as the world continues to move down the slippery slope, the Christians have moved to the same degree, away from their convictions. Even down here in the "Bible belt", it is evident. Our children definitely live in a different world than Luis and I did as children, and we are finding ourselves having to explain issues to them that we didn't even know about until high school and beyond. Never before has the world been so blatantly anti-Christian. This generation has very little knowledge of a moral standard, because for the first time in history, the generation before it, in general, has not passed it on to them. The alarm has been sounding...college campus shootings...school field trips to the county courthouse to watch a gay wedding...presidential candidate images hanging with a noose for all to see...and we keep hitting the snooze button, hoping for just a few more moments of sleep and warmth...Little do we know how late it has gotten, and how desperately we need to wake up!
