Happy Halloween!

It's October 31st! I may be too old to dress up and go trick-or-treating, but I'm never too old for scary movies and the same sugar cookies with a little pumpkin on them that I ate when I was a little kid. (pictured below...you're welcome)

Wednesday night, my roommate and I saw that Xfinity was letting users watch the Conjuring. Later that night, a dorm next to our's was having a "haunted dorm" so we decided it would be a brilliant idea to watch a scary movie before we went to the haunted dorm. So we turned on the movie (after minor technical issues) with me sitting in a bean-bag chair down on the floor while she was in her bed. Of course we both eventually ended up in her bed, along with our favorite disney stuffed animals (yes, this is acceptable in college). The fact that we watched this movie in a dark dorm built in the 1960s complete with bugs and lights that have been out since the beginning of the semester probably didn't help to ease our minds either. Nevertheless, we watched our movie.

If you've never seen The Conjuring, it's about like any other scary movie. Possession, demons, exorcisms, the works. Upon watching this movie, something dawned on me. The people being haunted always inevitably find a priest to perform an exorcism or bless the house. They put up crosses in their house, wear them around their necks. But in every single movie like this that I have ever seen, a statement is made about how they "aren't religious people". The reason they are putting up the crosses is to get rid of the spirits (if you've lived under a rock your entire life and have never seen a scary movie, religious icons scare the spirits away), so they obviously believe that these ghosts and demons are real, yet they still don't believe in Jesus. The very icons they are ornamenting their houses with to scare away an entity that is obsessively oppressing them are the same icons they decide to continuously deny. How? How can someone know that demons are real, know that images of Jesus Christ defeating death on a cross is the only way to get rid of them, yet still remain ignorant to the fact that Jesus has to be real if these demons are also real? It blows my mind.

Of course, I know that these are movies, but how often do  we see real people do this in real life? Too often. They deny the obvious, and it blows my mind....

**Important: the next paragraph actually has nothing to do with the subject of the blog but it's kind of important for the paragraph after it ***

I don't know about you, but I wholeheartedly believe in spirits, ghosts, and demons. We all know that demons are mentioned several times in the Bible, but have you ever read about ghosts? If not, you need to spend some time in the Old Testament. Saul goes to see a medium to conjure up the ghost of Samuel, and it worked. Thats enough proof for me. Granted, in this case the ghost was not meant to spook people and it definitely was not a work of Satan. However, I believe that exists too. Maybe not in the form we see in scary movies or even in the form mentioned in the Gospels, but I still believe it exists.

 *BACK TO THE POINT**

The thing I like most about The Conjuring would have to be the end. Most people probably would have turned the movie off by now or maybe didn't even read the last slide, but I did. It read something like "The Devil is real. God is real. Your destiny hinges upon who you decide to follow".  And it's so true. The saying "If you're not for me, you're against me" definitely holds true with Jesus. So on this Halloween I will choose to think of Jesus and not ghosts. The comfort of knowing that even though every day Satan is fighting for my soul, my God is stronger. Dress up as ghosts and witches today and rest easy, because God is still God.