I'm Only Sayin'...

EVERYbody’s a ghost hunter these days, aren’t they? There are plumber/hunters, student/hunters, family/hunters, international hunters, and the latest to round the bend is a couple of cops who’ll fight crime by day and investigate hauntings at night.

It’s all a bit much.

The last decade was filled with psychics and necromancers vying for our attention and our dollars, and for each spiritualist out there, 2 Christian apologists denied the truth of it all. I listen to a lot of talk radio when I’m on the road, and last week I heard a woman and host discussing the “errors” in modern religious thinking that Christian followers have incorporated into their own world views.  Many I agree are lies that have been accepted because they are “popular.” A church/leadership that calls itself Christian and yet denies the need for atonement is teaching heresy. If your church is telling you (or you are telling yourself) that you can be good enough to get to Heaven, or that you have the power to be good all by yourself PERIOD, then run. RUN. Find yourself a good book about the faith by R.C. Sproul or John Piper and curl up with a blanket and READ.

On the other side, if your church is telling you to march with a sign saying “Die, President fill-in-the-blank, Die!” you should heed the same advice. They’re just as messed up.

Where I drew the line with this woman, tho, was when she said Christians cannot have spiritual experiences (other than the Holy Spirit, of course) that aren’t demonic, that those of us who claim to have experienced ghostly activities have really met with familiar spirits, or demons. I find it hard to believe that demons would come around to comfort anybody, and I’ve heard too many stories and had enough experiences of my own that tend to make me believe there’s more to the story. I totally agree that familiar spirits are VERY active in the ghost hunting world, I just don’t think they’re alone.

OK, that wasn’t really ALL that set me off, but it was a start.

They had psychics back in the day, too. They were called “prophets.”The difference in our version and the original prophets is the origin of the message: a prophet never spoke for his own gain. His messages and visions were initiated by God, spoken for His purposes. They didn’t hold seances to try to contact anybody. God spoke directly to them, and they suffered for it. I doubt many modern psychics would acknowledge God, let alone live in the desert eating honey and locusts. It’s just a different mindset.

Biblically, we as Christians are supposed to stay far away from those who talk to the dead, from playing around with spiritual things. I don’t think any of us, Christian or not, are equipped to handle the consequences of playing with things we can’t see or comprehend. It’s obvious the spirit world operates on a whole other plane of existence, and we aren’t made to understand it. You wouldn’t tell a 3-yr old it’s ok to play in the interstate as long as they look both ways first, and that’s the mandate here. The consequences are much worse than death, no matter how many movies Hollywood makes to the contrary.

It doesn’t make me stop wanting a K2 meter, tho. I want to walk around back to the hanging trees that witnessed many prisoner crossings in the last 150 years, and see if I can have a conversation with some of them. I want to know why there are certain spots around the yard that make me feel uneasy. There’s a building in a nearby town with a haunted reputation that I would dearly love to investigate, but I won’t. It’s all pretty intriguing, but I ain’t stoopid.

You wanna come play in the middle of the interstate with me?