It was so strange on the last flight home. The woman next to me had her ankles, legs, and thighs covered in tatoos of vines, weeds, and (perhaps) flowers, but it was her large hands and fake fingernails that discomfited me most. I don’t know what it is, but when I see something that is designed to be feminine and beautiful but it is twisted into images of foreboding and spiritual darkness, I get what Momo and Granddaddy called the “Heebie-Jeebies.” It’s a country way of saying, “Yikes! Look out! Darkness is here!”

When a woman’s fingers are pressed with fake nails of black and dark green, and the tips are pointed like those found in portrayals of the witches muttering in Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” it’s ominous and darkness unfolds, as in the great tragedy. I looked over at her face. It was replete with piercings and steel loops and chains. There were piercings in her nose, above her eyebrows, between her nostrils, and more.

I was reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina on the flight back, but the pointed black tips to my left scratched mental scenes more from Macbeth than from AK into my thinking. I remain a Luddite, I suppose, where women are to be feminine and men are to be masculine, but as I see more and more in today’s unraveling culture of death and destruction, where we literally see men with beards walking around with purses and makeup and skirts and heels, and I–once again–understood why Romans 1 is just judgment for creatures who refuse their Creator.

The above is admittedly a sobering tone, and the subsequent posts will be mostly lighter fare. But we are in a strange time, and some folks have already long ago chosen the path of what Scripture calls folly, destruction, and suppression of the truth.