Every year, holidays come and go. Every year, people decorate their houses and yards for various of the holidays. And every year, I drive past hundreds and hundreds of these decked-out residences. And yet not until this year did this particular symbolic revelation occur to me. Are the relevant phenomena more pronounced this year — or is there something in me that needed this metaphor and thus only just discovered it?

Regardless, I’d like to share my ponderings with you.

To start off, I’ll let you know that I hate Halloween. I’m aware that not everyone does, and that many people I know enjoy many things about the holiday. And while my conscience does not allow me to participate at all, I don’t have a problem with dressing up, trading candy, or even with some of the silly spooky sort of things like cartoon ghosts or jack-o-lanterns. If it all just stopped there, I wouldn’t find every fall so difficult to get to.

Maybe it’s having kids that has changed my perspective. For me as an adult, it’s not as difficult to ignore the blatant evil that’s so present each October. The darker, more sinister decorations. Front yards turned into graveyards. Giant, frightening headless ghouls towering over us at the Walmart self-checkout. Severed hands and feet hanging from a tree we walked by on our way to a birthday party.

It just felt so oppressive this year. I felt like every turn led to me having to work my hardest to protect my children as best I could from the evil all around us, and talk to them gently and honestly about the things I couldn’t protect them from. By the end of the season, all of us dreaded even leaving the house to drive anywhere.

Then, like magic, October 31st passes and it all vanishes.

Maybe the shift is more immediate than it used to be. I don’t know. I just know that it felt like no time passed between driving past depictions of death, and driving past homes covered in light, yards full of joy and wonder. One moment we were trying desperately to resist the weight of evil — and the next, we were surrounded by uplifting beauty.

And only this year, did I grasp a new significance to this sudden transformation.

In this world, we walk in so much darkness. Everywhere we go, there is evil I must protect my kids from or explain biblically to them, everywhere around us there is so much to discourage and frighten us. Yet a day is coming, a day when all of that will fade instantly away, replaced by a beauty so far above Christmas lights and nativity scenes. We will walk in joy so much greater than the wooden letters that spell it out in front of so many homes this time of year — and yet those letters point to the truth that lies ahead.

The dramatic, sudden transformation from Halloween to Christmas pales in comparison to the dramatic shift we will one day experience between Earth and Heaven. And yet how blessed I have been in the struggle to see this analogy playing out so clearly everywhere I go.

Now, we are in darkness. And the Christmas lights will come down soon enough, and next year we will have to go through another autumn of things I would so much prefer to avoid. But one day, so soon in the light of all eternity, all of that will be put away, and we will put on a light that lasts forever.