We live in an extraordinarily dangerous world on all levels, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. We are so used to our own survival that we may not acknowledge how truly vulnerable we are. Age shows us that a casual misstep can be a fall with broken bones added. Yet we’ve seen double leg amputees live and thrive. We constantly face the mixed message of vulnerability and endurance.

We are amazing creatures with perception at every level of life. We can perceive the smallest breeze or change in temperature to picking up on the slightest inference in a vocal tone or word. Our perceptions are within our own body and without in all that surrounds us. Perceptions all require interpretation. What does our perception mean? How are we to respond? All levels can choose their own independent response from ignore to hight alert. We are amazingly complex.

I wonder if our survival hasn’t given us an instinct of simplification with a first response of safe or danger. Humans often turn things to their worst side by their automatic inclination to interpret things as a threat. I wonder if that isn’t survival imbedded in us. It turns all things into warnings but also as harbinger of doom through interpretation, habitual thinking.

I believe we are spiritual creatures with spiritual perception. Part of that spiritual perception is represented in the ease with which we turn things into omens and superstitions. All cultures are filled with these in story form, experience, and response. We know that evil is around us in our omens and superstitions. That is also an indirect way of proving faith. Omens and superstitions turn us to fear and our own inability to completely protect ourselves. It also proves that God is and hope is because evil could not be discerned if there were no opposite to it.

This Halloween might be a good time to get in touch with our fears and decide those are the locations we prefer God to inhabit in our lives. There is always the fun of a ghost story well told, but real fear devours our ability to live free and function. “Perfect love casts out fear,” according to a guy named John. I believe that people who pursue the true love that casts out fear will find Jesus. He is alive and available.