The gospel in a pumpkin...

So, what do you think of Halloween? (or Hallowe'en, or however you wish to spell it...)
Part of me still wonders what I think about it, but here's what I've been thinking about it this year...
I wasn't brought up to think it was an evil thing (odd, perhaps, with a darker side, maybe) and I seem to have memories of having bat wings made for a costume one year. I'm pretty sure that was Halloween, but maybe it was just a costume party of our favourite nocturnal animals!
We bought some pumpkins this year (I tried growing them, but the size they got to, it would have been difficult to carve a gnat's face into them!), inspired partly by a fireplace I saw on the internet. The first one, I carved with flames in it. It looked great, but because it sat on the mantelpiece (rather than in the cold outside) it got rather furry rather quickly, so had to go to the compost bin.
The other pumpkins were carved this weekend and sat on our step to welcome people who were 'trick or treating'. So, is it good, or is it bad.
Well, this year, I've been thinking that Halloween in general and the pumpkin in particular gives a great outline for what we believe as Christians. I even chatted with Joshua about the pumpkin, and he got the point too. First, there's all the scary costumes. Kids love dressing up scary, it would appear. They are happy to wander around with axes and witches hats and 'blood' pouring from their heads. Weird. But would they actually like to meet someone wandering around with a real axe, with real blood pouring from their head? Perhaps not. But the desire to dress up bad gives the first point. We all want to be bad, to a certain extent. The Bible would call that sin, and it's a reminder that evil does exist in the world, and a lot of it comes from us.
The pumpkin, for me, is a reminder of the solution. (Not to pull a scary face, that doesn't tend to work very well in most difficult circumstances.) Here's a rough outline of my conversation with Joshua about it all:
Me: What do we put in the pumpkins sweetheart?
J: (After a little nudging!) candles.
Me: And what does a candle give us?
J: Light. (I'm not sure quite how he got this, because the question was a bit unclear!)
Me: Now, sometimes you get scared at nighttime don't you?
J: Yes.
Me: What is sometimes scary for you? (Hoping he doesn't latch onto this and become permanently terrified of the dark!)
J: It's dark.
Me: And what stops it being dark?
J: Light. (He's a genius, my boy!)
Me: Now, if the dark is a reminder of bad and scary things, then the light is a reminder of good things. Now, who looks after us all the time?
J: God? (We discuss this often, so it wasn't too hard to get there!)
Me: Yes, and the Bible sometimes says that Jesus is like a light. He is good and protects us, and when he's in us, we're safe.

Now, I wouldn't want to reduce to gospel permanently to a level that a three year old could grasp, because it's so much more than that too, but to me, the pumpkin has a light in, which drives away the darkness, which is precisely what Christians are promised. We have God's Spirit living in us, and He is able to drive away the darkness.

"Light of the world, You stepped down into darkness, opened my eyes, let me see..."