The man burns while they swirl above.

If Frank Peretti wrote about Burning Man.

Burning Man 2023 turned out to be a September mud debacle. When the vast alkaline desert gets a rain storm, it’s all mud and quicksand and destroyed skin.

I’m not crying about it.

The rare times Burning Man comes to mind, I mostly think of how I never ever want to go to it. They can call it a pop-up art festival, but no thanks. There’s not enough penicillin and holy water and portable bidets in the world to make that happen. Why don’t you just build Molech and call it done?

But watching the reports about the muddy disaster included a report from a pilot in some kind of lightweight airplane. This got me thinking about Frank Peretti and the two books of his that I read as a teenager that forever changed the way I viewed the reality of the spiritual realm: This Present Darkness, and Piercing The Darkness.

Not only were the original covers of the book stellar, featuring the gorgeous art of Ron DiCianni, but the stories were action-packed in a way like no other books I’d read at the time. Peretti’s view of life was from a much different vantage point than we daily consider.

While I won’t say you’re going to want to make theology out of Peretti’s books, I will say that it made me realize that prayer matters and that there really is a spiritual realm, a place of war, happening around us. We’re seeing it more and more in the reports people are making of strange UFOs, aliens, and cryptids, reports that seem to be increasing every day. The spiritual realm seems to be invading our nice “normal” physical realm.

What if someone were to write about Burning Man, but in the manner of Frank Peretti? I wondered as the video of the mud-soaked playa, with its paganistic ready-to-burn man stood high above the plain like Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue, surrounded by 70K “burners” waiting for someone to light the match.

I am not Peretti, nor do I tell a good story. But, in the day before Halloween and all of that weirdness, here’s a potential snippet of what it might read like. Go read one of Peretti’s books if you want a better understanding of what I’m attempting (poorly) to do here.