A Child Against the Darkness

I've commented before on how Mexico makes a five-day weekend out of celebrating death, so I won't go into that too much again, but I did want to comment about an evangelistic event we had last weekend. Co-worker Tina wrote about it as well on her blog, check it out. I've also unabashedly stolen her pictures for this post. Can you find David below? No, he couldn't handle putting on wings, but at least we convinced him to put on a white shirt!

Joseline, who coordinates the kids activities for the church, decided to dress our church kids in angel outfits, roam the streets and give out candy and tracts. I wrote the text for that (in Spanish), you can check that out HERE if you want. I thought it was an excellent idea...we didn't ignore the celebration, we just celebrated Life instead of death.

I was reminded of the scene from Lord of the Rings, the third part of the trilogy, where Gandalf rides out with the horsemen from Rohan...our band of white angels confronting the hords of orcs on the streets of our neighborhood. We did encounter hords of people dressed up in zany disguises. The streets were fuller than I've ever seen them.

Funny, I'm sure that we were viewed by some as more freaky than the most bizarrely dressed vampire or zombie. It's wierd-cool to be good, in a counter-cultural, upside-down way. I can just hear it. Yeah, I saw some really scary, freaked-out outfits, but the scariest of all of them were a bunch of kids dressed as angels, telling people that death has been defeated by Jesus.

We also saw a display of hundreds of Holy Death/Grim Reaper images, some small, some quite big, reminding us that the weekend isn't just fun and games for many. People actually worship the Death image here. Over 3 million Mexican do. Let that figure sink in.

The world is getting darker. Can you sense it? Still, one child with a holy heart scares the darkest darkness away.