When Things Come Back to Haunt You

While at my in-laws last week, we made a poor choice. My teenage son wanted to watch "Pet Sematary" ... a spooky Steven King outing wherein family pet kitty gets run over by a truck. Spooky neighbor (nice to see the late Fred Gwynne - of Herman Munster fame) shows daddy and dead kitty to an old Indian grave site. Amazingly kitty comes back but is a bit twisted ... scary. Predictably toddler son is killed, daddy takes him to the Indian grave site (even though a ghost tells him the ground is 'sour'). Toddler son comes back from the dead, kills spooky neighbor, kills mommy. Daddy kills toddler, takes mommy to the graveyard, mommy comes back and kills daddy. It's a bloody movie. My 15 year old loved it, unfortunately it scared the socks off of my 6 year old granddaughter (who had her eyes closed through half of it before we vacated her from the room). Today after we got home from services, we were milling around volunteering each other to cook lunch. Outside we heard some screaming and sounds that didn't sound too happy. Going outside, we noticed our neighbor on the curb weeping and screaming. Her mother was with her. We rushed out to see if there was anything we could do. I saw the reason when I got about ten feet from the corpse of her cat. It had been in the engine of her car. Not a pretty site. I don't know how old she is, maybe 17 or 18, but she was just beside herself. We got a towel and covered up the cat until a friend picked it up and carried it to their house. They put it in a bag, tried to console the girl, and prepared to bury it. And that's when I realized we had made a bad choice. My granddaughter thinks that the cat will be reborn tonight and come to kill us. It all seems too much like bad karma. Well, if I do not post for the next few days you may know what happened. No one will believe you, though. The resurrection scene of Matthew 25 is scary to me. It seems to be a time when things come back to haunt you. There are those who ignored the opportunities presented to them ... and those who ignorantly did what they were supposed to do. Overall, I think it serves as a warning to those who made an initial choice to be saved, but ignored the holy life to which they were called. It's hard for me to mesh judgment and grace. I so much believe in the security of the believer that I think it's actually hard for a child of God to be lost. But it can happen. For Christians, though, I think the resurrection is one day when things do not come back to haunt you. Not even resurrected killer kittys.