The house is dark; silhouetted by the light of the full moon behind. Domineering iron gates guard the house; they guard the dirt walkway, the walkway overrun with weeds and shielded from view by the fog hanging near the earth, near the tombstones that are off to the right. Bats fly high in the moonlight, and low in the fog down between the tops of the tombstones and near the windows of the decrepit house. Green misty light pours out the windows, inviting timid creatures to peer in and look for movement.
The front door swings open with the breeze; inside, two couches face one another, both with well worn seats showing where friends once sat for evening conversation. A coffee table adorned with scroll edging has round imprints from mugs once filled with tea, coffee, hot cocoa. Attached to the plaid couch with cobwebs sits an end table; on top, a photo showing a family; mom, dad, two girls, standing in front of a house bathed in sunlight. The dirt walkway lined with marigolds; cut green grass extended to the edge, and barely in the upper left hand side of the photo, blurred, leaves of a willow tree and on the right, two tips of an iron gate. The photo caught the essence of the moment that was: vitality, warmth, life.
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Do you live in a haunted house?
A haunted house of your mind?
Do you hear voices that echo off the walls of your mind? You tell them to leave you alone, but they don’t.
Maybe a ghost lives there. You live in constant fear of whatever lurks around the corner.
Your past; your past hangs on your back like an iron saddle. The blood on the floor suggests perhaps it’s a vampire that makes his home there. He is over eight hundred years old; being immortal, and knows the intimate details of the lives of those he follows, as well as their parents and grandparents. His teeth have latched on to you, sucking the life out of you to sustain him with food.
Maybe a creature like Leatherface lives with you, firing his chainsaw, which inflames your fury. You live with your anger and it burns the pit of your stomach; sears your soul to the point of depression.
Or maybe, your houseguest appears to be a friend. Slowly, you discover it’s the witch of towering expectations; not the witch with a pointed black hat, but the wiccan witch who entrances you to believe you’re nothing if you don’t live up to them. You believe you are a constant disappointment to others; mainly, to God.
For me, it’s the red ants. That is, ANTS. Automatic Negative Responses, which I was taught, torment those people who lodge with chronic pain. I have always feared ants more than spiders. They lead you to think the worst, leaving you vulnerable to ghosts of fear that move through skin cells like osmosis.
No matter the face of the beast that bullies you, it’s always worse at night. The black bats that beat you down are nocturnal; the dark lures them out to begin their harassment. What’s strange is, if you actually discovered you were living in a haunted house, you’d run. Sell the house if you could; burn it if there were no other options. Anything to escape the hell you have been living in.
So why do we sit in our haunted houses of the mind? Why do we get cozy there, trying to find tranquility by changing the décor instead of looking for doors? I once found a chair so comfortable that the spiders wove their sticky cobwebs around me for so long I could not get up.
Don’t wait that long. Get help. If you live in a haunted house, there is a way out. It takes time, hard work, and a little bit of surrender. The main thing is, you can’t do it on your own. Extend your arm through the cobwebs outside the window into the fog. There are people ready and able to help you. You are not doomed to live there forever. Let others pull you out; let them help you gut the house, clean out the cobwebs and show you some truth. A house restored is always more beautiful than it was before it was haunted.---alg"Then I said to myself, 'Oh He even sees me in the dark! At night I'm immersed in the light!' It's a fact: darkness and light, they're all the same to you." Psalm 139, 11-12
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