Charmingly Gift-Wrapped, Ancient Evil

When I was home for a few weeks over the winter break, my mom and I spent a lot of time window shopping in beautiful boutiques in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, and Solvang. One of the objects that we saw and piqued our interest was a little, charmingly bound, small red book titled, “Fortune Telling Book of Birthdays.” The book had a description of a personality for individuals born on each day of the year. It struck both of us as amazingly accurate analysis of both the noble and less-stellar parts our our personalities on our respective birthdays. Neither of us purchased the book, but we both noted it.

A few days later, my mom mentioned that she wished she had purchased the book because it was so spot-on and she wanted to remember what it had said. So, I stored that away in my memory and went and purchased the book from my local Anthropologie in Georgetown, with the intent to send it to her. Before I sent it, however, I showed it to a few friends of mine to see what they thought about their own birthday fortunes. I found that many of them also thought it was pretty accurate, but nothing too out of the ordinary. I then took it into work intending to send it.

Before I did send, it, however, I tucked it into the desk in my office and forgot about it. That night, I was thinking about the “Fortune Telling” aspect of the book, which is really in title only, as the book only offers a personality description…nothing prophetic or beyond reason except its broad generalization. I justified the “spiritism” of its premise by the fact that, like with Chinese medicine, there are ancient civilizations that have been on the earth infinitely longer than our modern western, Christian era, and therefore they have a much larger scope of knowledge to draw from. Perhaps, then, there is nothing to “Fortune telling” rather than assessment of characteristics and data over millennia and millennia, where patterns could emerge that actually make sense. For example, maybe in the past thousands of years, there were enough millions of individuals born on my birthdate that had similar personality characteristics to me that generalizable patterns could be drawn about people who are born on 23 December. Therefore, I despiritualized the fortune telling aspect of the book in my mind and went soundly to sleep….

…ONLY to be awoken rudely in the middle of the night with a horrid nightmare. It was evil and scary and terrible. I shook my head and tried to settle back to rest, when an image of a nefarious snake entered my mind. I knew it symbolized evil and Godless spirituality. I just knew deeply in my core that it was a warning of the dark spiritism of that aspect of life. And I needed to get rid of the book. No, I cannot send it to my mom. I cannot return it to Anthropologie for another person to buy. I must get rid of it. Throw it in the dumpster where no one can rescue it.

It’s not the book itself that is evil, but what lies behind it. I was so ready to accept the “fun” and “Gimmick” of the novel book. But evil and sin is not, not ever, novel. It is the oldest trick in the world. Thank you Lord for showing me this.