Me And Other Victims Of A Cruel Hoax

I’m not the only one.

Hundreds of people all over the Internet were suckered in by a youtube site post which claimed to produce a bright glowing light by mixing Mountain Dew soda pop with baking soda and hydrogen peroxide.

Since my Halloween coffin collapsed, I thought it might be a neat idea for a yard display to do something with glowing green lights, so this morning I experimented with the ingredients and I produced a stick mess which does not even twinkle.

I tried again and again thinking I was doing something wrong, maybe adding too much baking soda or something.

More sticky mess.

Maybe if I shook the bottle harder…

I spilled some of the glop on Ginny’s dinning room table and it corroded the finish! (No, I did not think to spread waxed paper first.)

Boy, am I in trouble when she comes home!

Maybe if I put a placemat over those bloches… Thank God for Antiques Roadshow; I’ll tell her that I’ve added to the patina of the table top. Yes indeed. Patina is a great word; I’d never heard it before watching the Roadshow. Now, I use it all the time.

Since shaking the bottle harder did not produce light, I decided to check back online to read the instructions again. I Googled the words “dew & glow” and I found that the whole scam is a hoax.

I’m not the only one to get fooled. Scads of people produced the same sticky mess I did without a glimmer of light; they posted their results online too with comments ranging from puzzlement to outrage.

No wonder.

We’d been promised light only to get sticky glop.

We were deceived by a slick liar.

Who does that remind me of?

Who is it who imitates an angel of light only to spread darkness and nasty sticky mess? Who lures gullible people into doing foolish things and making a mess of their lives? What hoaxer tricks us into mixing up perfectly good ingredients in ways their Maker never intended?

Some people think Halloween celebrates the power of this creep.

The power of evil?

Phooy.

What power does evil have?

But doesn’t evil hold sway in the world? You see evil things on tv news every night.

Would it be news if it were not unusual?

Don’t most people try to lead useful, peaceful, purposeful lives as best they can? Evil makes the news because it is an anomaly.

What would a news broadcaster have to say about a man who kisses his wife bye, goes to work, eats lunch with friends, knocks off at five, enjoys a beer with buddies, goes home for supper, watches the game, tucks the kids in, makes love to his wife, and drops off to sleep?

Most of us are so used to a peaceful, loving life, that we take it for granted.

That’s why evil things shock us. The cancer diagnosis, the affair, the child abuse, the divorce, Daddy’s death, getting fired — all these evil things seem powerful not only because they are evil but also because they do not fit our normal pattern of life.

Yet the imitation angel of light shines his spotlight on vile tragedy to magnify the worst things going on in the world. He appears to be in charge because his acts are all he wants us to see. He can not obliterate the glory and majesty of God’s creation, he only obscures it and misdirects our attention to lesser things.

If we lived in a cave, the enemy would shine his false light only on bats and spiders, he would never illuminate the crystal stalagmites shimmering all around us.

He fosters a distorted view of life, and creation.

What a looser.

I’m involved in writing a book on the history of firefighting in my hometown and I’ve gotten up to the Civil War period… Not to disparage my northern brethren, but here in the South, to hear my grandparents tell it, the yankees personified evil.

At 1 p.m. on March 12, 1862, yankees invaded Jacksonville, the first of four such occupations. When they retreated, according to my Grandmother, they torched homes and businesses, they poisoned wells, they chopped down pecan trees, they slaughtered livestock. They raped women and molested children, they uprooted crops, they stole Bibles from the churches, they robbed banks, and drank up all the whisky in bars. They plundered and looted and destroyed and burned and spoiled.

Reminds me of the power of evil.

That looser angel is beaten and in full retreat to his appointed place, but as he goes down, he acts like a yankee spoiling all the good things in his path. Not because he has any use for good, but just to keep God’s people from having it.

The above is a bad example because in real history the yankees won and many returned to Jacksonville to live after the war and some of those immigrants assimilated into Southern society and eventually became almost civilized.

(Would you ever guess that I’m from the South?)

They had no monopoly on atrocity; our brave Southern troops did the same sort of things. Remember Andersonville?

And I’ve done more than my share of evil in my time. Hate to admit it, but in my own way I have out-yankeed those old-time yankee soldiers. Jesus is my only claim to righteousness and that is only because Christians are accepted in the Beloved.

All have sinned and fall short. There’s not a teddy bear among us.

But, my point here is that like a defeated, loosing, retreating army, the enemy of our souls acts out of pure spite.

A spoiled brat on his way to bed down where he ought to, he’s throwing a temper tantrum as he goes.

This is not to say the looser does no damage. He does plenty of damage. He ruins lives, corrupts love, spoils life, squelches hope. He lies and cheats and steals joy. He wastes good things like a rat in a flour package pissing and crapping on the grain he can’t eat.

That’s the pathetic power of evil.

Yet the Apostle John said, “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil”.

And Jesus Himself said, “The Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them”.

Remember, the evil one has no use for human souls. He just wants to spoil us.

The love of God is shown toward us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us, nailed to a cross, pinned down and splayed out like a frog on a dissection tray.

The regard of satan is shown toward us in that he…in that he… Er, come to think of it, the evil one never suffered so much as a hangnail to gain us.

Some prince, huh?

The matter is really quite simple:

God loves; satan deceives; man chooses.

But, alas, men chose darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.

The only wormglow the adversary offers us is a deceitful, spiteful hoax that will never light up no matter how hard we shake the bottle.

Now, it’s time for me to stop writing — I need to dig in the linen closet to find a really big placemat for the table.

Happy Halloween.