IT'S UGLY; I WON'T LOOK

My walks in the early morning darkness take me past yards that recently have been decorated for Halloween. There are dogs with elongated, bloody fangs and red eyes—and simulations of people with the same. There are skeletons, witches, and demonic looking pirates. There are zombies, vampires and witches with warts. There are black freakish cats, ghoulish goblins, dwarfs, and devils. I’m not fearful, but I do no more than quickly divert my eyes. I don’t want to look. To me, it’s all just ugliness. Nothing cute about it. None could honestly look at such a display and say, “Oh, that’s so beautiful!” Unless you are an osteologist or such, I cannot imagine your thinking that a human skeleton is beautiful. I’m sorry, but to me, it’s ugly. If God meant our skeletons to be beautiful, He would have made them external. Is it any mistake that the world always exalts the contorted, the distorted, the mutilated, the mangled, the deformed, the malformed, the aberration, the abnormality, of all God created, of all that is good and wholesome? The eyes are enlarged, mapped with red arteries or are all red. The features of the faces are contorted. The figures are twisted. And, folks think it is cute when even small children, targeted by marketing, become fascinated with those twisted representations, and beg to buy or watch such. Parents buy the children the toy figure, the T-shirt, the Halloween costumes, and let them watch on TV all that ugliness. I do not understand this fascination and fixation with the dark and distorted. What is happening is so clear, you’d think that folks would awaken to what is going on. God is about beauty. Satan is about ugliness. God is about light and life. Satan is about darkness and death. God has light emanating angels. Satan has repulsive imps. God in a life gives one a pleasant countenance. Satan in a life gives one a dark, dull, hardened, lined countenance. From vampires to zombies to the demon possessed—all things that are so ugly and dark—all of it--is glorified in today’s world. This is not only by satanic design, it is a true reflection of reality. Evil and sin are ugly. Good and holiness are beautiful. Sin makes dark, dirty, defiled, deformed, and destroyed. Good makes alive, peaceful, enlightened, whole. God made the world and its human inhabitants beautiful, “good.” Satan, sin, and evil took the same and made it all ugly. Increasingly, I see the ugliness of sin. Abuse is ugly. Racism is ugly. Adultery is ugly. The ravage of alcoholism is ugly. The consequences of drug use, ugly. Betrayal, ugly. The perversions of sex as God created it, perversions from fornication to homosexuality to transgenderism, ugly. One may protest that I feel this way because beauty is only in the eyes of the beholder. That may be so, but that is more frightening. What is in the heart and head of someone who would see beauty in death, the dark sided, the demonic, the distorted…. None can ever look at the display of God in the world, in a human, in a face, in an act, in a word, and say, “That was ugly.” No, where there is God, there is only beauty. So, no, I can’t and I won’t look at the displays of darkness, distortion, death, and demons and say, That’s beautiful! It’s not. It’s ugly. But, oh, the beauty of God. I’ve seen that beauty on the face of one who came to repent and to surrender his life to God. He came hardened, troubled, dark in countenance. He arose with a shine, a glow, a peace, of forgiveness. I have seen God intervene in a marriage that was about irreparably to split apart, but as the two sought God, there was a healing, a reconciling, a remerging of hearts. I have seen, as God made Himself known and hope rise in the face of a child who has come to church from an house of drugs, perversion, and squalor. Now in those things there is beauty. Oh, the beauty of forgiveness, the beauty of reconciliation, the beauty of hope. The beauty of love. The beauty of God. I will take a look at those things. No ugliness there.

IT'S UGLY; I WON'T LOOK

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