Are You Afraid Of the Dark?

It's officially fall! This is my favorite time of year. I love the weather, I love the leaves, I love everything about it. My husband and I have established more "traditions" during fall then during Christmas. We have frequent bonfires outside, eat lots of chili while watching Colts games (sorry Browns/Bengals fans! I'm an Indiana girl now!), dress up the dogs on October 31^st (Charlie is Batman and Lucy is a bumblebee) and hand out candy to the neighborhood kids while sitting on our decorated porch, complete with corn stalks, hay bales, and pumpkins. And the pumpkins we pick out at Piney Acres farm.

Piney Acres, a Christmas tree farm, offers a corn maze, hay rides, and a pumpkin patch this time of year which we now make a yearly visit to. Last year I was brave enough to try the corn maze "haunted." We had gone during the daylight before, and I thought it would be fun to try at night. Armed with flashlights, we set out for the maze on a Friday night. I was literally shaking as we walked toward the maze, not knowing what to expect, or what things would jump out at me as I wondered thru the narrow paths.

We entered the opening of the maze, a large group of teenagers in front of us. I was shining the flashlight all over the place, trying to figure out the first thing it was that would try to scare me. My flashlight caught a glimpse of a mummy hiding in the corn. "I see you! I see you! Don't come after me! Don't you move!" I yelled at the poor person in costume as Eric tried to calm me down and keep me moving. I turned, and in front of me was a hay bale with two beings on it. I froze. I knew one was a person and one was stuffed, but I couldn't figure out which one was which fast enough. Suddenly, one of them stood up and started walking towards me. I screamed uncontrollably and caught the attention of every one of the teens ahead of me, and every person behind me. This wasn't a simple startled yell, this was continuous screams of absolute terror. We were in there no more than five minutes, and the scene I had just made over a ten year old in a mask, whom I had clearly seen, was enough to let my husband know that an hour of this was more than I could physically handle.

He should have known better then to let me even try it. When we were dating, we went into the fun house on Navy Pier in Chicago, and I screamed more than the five-year-old girl ahead of us. Fun house, mind you, not haunted house.

Fear is no fun. Real fear is debilitating; it's consuming. But it doesn't come from God. 2 Timothy 1:7 says, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." It's that sound mind part that I seem to forget. Whenever I'm wrapped up in my fears, whether it be the creepy noises I hear when I'm at home by myself while Eric's working a night shift, or the worry about losing him and becoming a young widow, or the endless 'what ifs' I think might happen in our future, my sound mind is gone. It's long gone. And if I'm using that sound mind God has given me, and remembering His promises I know to be true, I realize that the fears I have are irrational, illogical, and a lack of faith on my part.

So while I'm still learning to use this sound mind, I think I'll avoid any and all things haunted.

Emily