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Every year around Halloween there is the annual replaying of scary movies on TV; Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street. These slasher films are part of our collective cultural consciousness. Most of us have seen at least one of these. They’re some of the highest grossing films of all time. We seem to be fascinated by this film genre. Sometimes one of my kids will say, let’s watch a scary movie, and we’ll sit on our couches waiting to be scared. There’s something about us that seems to like to be scared as long as we’re in the cozy confines of our homes. Curling up on a couch to watch a slasher film may be a fun thing to do, but no one wants to live in that kind of fear in real life. We like to be scared on a movie screen, but if we truly faced someone with a hockey mask and a chain saw we would be very, very, afraid.
When the prophet Haggai spoke to his people he called them not to be afraid. “Take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts…My spirit abides among you; do not fear. Haggai 2:4-5. What were they afraid of? Haggai couldn’t have been telling his people not to be afraid of the Jasons and the Freddie Krugers. Such terrors had not yet been invented. However, fear has been around since the dawn of time. I think he was telling his people that they didn’t need to live in fear of the many and various ways that fear comes to us in our daily lives; not in the form of knives and chain saws but in the form of stress, worry and anxiety about all the unknowns that lay just around the corner. These are the fears that most of us can identify with. Who amongst us doesn’t feel stressed, troubled, worried and afraid of the future. Who doesn’t stew over things now and then. I wonder if what Haggai was saying was that we do not need to live in fear of the unknown, to live in a constant state of stress, to live as a troubled people, plagued by worry, hounded by regrets about the past and uncertainties about the future. These are the fears that many of us face and this I think was what Haggai was trying to address when he told his people not to be afraid. Haggai wants us to know the same thing he wanted his people to know, that God’s spirit abides with us in the midst of all that we fear. We live at a time when anxiety and stress are as destructive to our well-being as any knife wielding masked intruder. Haggai reminds us that everything belongs to the Lord, our pasts, our present and our futures. This week may we turn all our fears over to God and trust that his sprit abides with us now and always.
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