What Monster Need We Fear?

I personally am not a fan of spook alleys or scary movies. When I was about eight or nine, my dad took my brother and I through a spook alley. The coffin with the creepy hands coming out and raising the lid was not so bad, but the cackling judge holding a string to a bloody guillotine which he raised and let fall with fiendish glee was a bit much. But what really got me was the skeleton-man behind bars. He started dancing around and THEN, if that weren’t enough, he burst out of the bars (which were only hanging in place rather than fixed in place) and mingled among us. To my young mind, the horror of something like that breaking out made me feel very unsafe. I’ve never gone to a spook alley since.

I’ve read that one of the reasons that our society likes scary stuff is that we like to be able to confront our fears and then be able to escape them. Something about watching vampires, werewolves, and zombies attack and then be beaten back seems to make real life seem safer? I don’t know.

A few years ago I ran across a verse that is a great thing to remember in all the Halloween stuff.

O how great the goodness of our God, who prepareth a way for our escape from the grasp of this awful monster; yea, that monster, death and hell, which I call the death of the body, and also the death of the spirit. (2 Nephi 9:10)

This verse tells me that the only thing we need to fear is death and hell. Death has been conquered by Christ’s resurrection, so our submission to death will only be temporary. This leaves hell, which is entered through sin. So I guess that we only really need to worry about the monster of sin. As things get worse in society, our lives will turn into the equivalent of a monster movie, but just remember that when the sin zombies are after you, Christ has overcome all sin too, through his atonement, and because He has, we can overcome it by repentance and faith in Christ.