Remember in Home Alone when Kevin was scared to go down into his basement? If you remember, it was because of this imagined monster that was down there. Really it was his furnace and nothing to be afraid of. And yet I can totally relate to Kevin!
I have to admit that there were plenty of times growing up that I would book it up the stairs from our basement. My feet scurried as fast as they could and sometimes even missed a step in the rush. I was scared. I’ll admit it now. I was frightened by what might be down there. Of course, I’d never seen a basement monster, or – as I was more likely to believe – somebody crouching in the corner of our basement waiting to jump me.
I know that many can relate to this kind of scenario. Basements can be scary places, let’s just admit it!! But I think what makes the most scary is the unknown. It’s those basement monsters that we’ve never once seen but, at the same time, can’t totally rule out, that get us.
We don’t like going to the dark places. We don’t like searching out the unknown. I actually saw this played out the other night during our youth service. I had spoken a message that was challenging and had ended on a note of personal reflection and inspection. It was a heart-searching moment. But I noticed how uncomfortable a number of people felt with doing this.
You could tell with the body language of those in the room that, while some were digging deep, others weren’t sure they wanted to go down into the basement. It’s much easier for us to live above the ground level. We can go on about our lives, relationships, and work that we do and deal with situations and outcomes.
All of this is important but can often keep us from going where we need to go. We need to face what might lie in the basement of our lives and of our hearts. We need to go down to that point past the things we do to the reasons why we do them. We need to go past the situations we find ourselves in down to where our view of that situation. And we need to go past outcomes to down to the cause behind how we got there.
All of this can seem rather heady. It can seem challenging. It can seem unimportant. It can seem scary. Oh my gosh we could keep going with all the reasons we’ll give for talking ourselves out of it! Why ever would we want to go into the basements of our lives anyways?! Well, if we’re ever going to save our house, as we learned from Home Alone, it’s probably important that we secure the whole thing.
We may be surprised by the things that are down there that need dealt with and cleaned up. But then again, we may also be surprised to find that some things that we feared as basement monsters were no more than our mind playing tricks on us!