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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I my favorite Doctor is David Tennant, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson learned from a Halloween party.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
We went to church fairly regularly when I was a young kid. My parents divorced when I was 9, and we really didn’t go much at all after that. My grandparents went every time the doors were open, so if we stayed the weekend with them, we went to church. Their denomination was the Assemblies of God. The youth program at the Assemblies of God is called Royal Rangers, and it was awesome.
For the boys, it was a lot like Boy Scouts. The girls were called Missionettes. They may have been like Girl Scouts, but I really have no idea. As I said, I was pretty young, so I didn’t get to do as much as the older groups did, but we did get to go camping. It was awesome. We’d go out to a campground that was nothing but a blank canvas of earth. We’d set up tents, make a campfire, and cook our food over the fire. We all had mess kits to eat with and I felt like a kid from a century before while we were out there.
Partially because I enjoyed the Royal Rangers so much, I wanted to join the Boy Scouts. I wasn’t old enough for Boy Scouts so when I was 7 or 8, I joined the cub scouts. One year for Halloween, we had a Halloween party. I don’t really remember where it was for sure, but I think it was as an American Legion Hall or something like that.
Out in the main area of the room were a variety of activities for us to enjoy. I remember being really annoyed by how difficult it was to bob for apples. However, the thing that I remember most did not happen in the main room. I don’t know if it was set up in the kitchen or if there was a storage room, but whatever it was, it had two points of entry and it was walled off from the main room. They had set up a haunted house that took us in one door, through the series of haunts, and then out through the second door.
Since Cub Scouts are all between the ages of 7 and 11 I’m sure that it was a pretty lame haunted house. However, this was the early 80’s and movies like Poltergeist, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Thing, and Children of the Corn were killing the box office.
The haunted house employed things like strobe lights, black lights, and scary costumes to heighten our sense of fright. I’m sure you’ve been through at least one haunted house so you know the drill. The path to walk through the haunted house was narrow and it took me closer to the sights than I would have preferred. At one point the path through the haunted house made a turn to the right. As we walked through the turn, we were faced with the scariest creature I had ever seen. It was a wolfman trapped behind bars.
The wolfman growled and howled out as people walked by. He pressed himself up against the bars to get his arms out as far as possible and grab those who got too close. As I a neared the creature I was terrified. I knew that he was not real. I knew that the whole thing was fake. I knew it was just a man in a suit. However, none of that mattered.
I stopped dead in my tracks and screamed out in terror. Seeing my fear, the creature reached out for me and growled. I was paralyzed. The more I showed fear, the more he came after me. Sure the bars were holding him back, but that didn’t give me any courage. After what seemed like an eternity, an adult came up and told the wolfman to let me pass. Apparently the area behind me had gotten congested because I was holding up the line. The wolfman relented and pulled his arms back into his cell. Once he was out of the way I looked at the path and made my way out of the haunted house.
Here’s what I learned.
Fear can be paralyzing. It can make us stop dead in our tracks. It can take our eyes off the path of progress. The reality was that the wolfman would not have harmed me. The reality was that there was plenty of room for me to get by outside of the reach of the wolf man. The reality was, the wolf man was not nearly as scary in real life as he was in my mind.
Because I was only focused on the fear, it not only paralyzed me, it blinded me to see reality. It blinded me to see the clear path through the the obstacle. It blinded me to see the fear for the imposter that it was.
There are some great life lessons in that reality. However, there’s another lesson here. The truth is, we sometimes get paralyzed and blinded by fear and once we’re in that position, it can be hard to break free. In times like that, we need those around us to come to our aid and help us. We need friends who will help the fear go away, show us the path to freedom, and bring us back to safety.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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