Confessions of a reformed zombie:

Bear with me for a moment; I’m going to get religious and I’m going to talk about bad, creepy TV. The former will bother some people, and the latter will bother others. You have been warned.

Last night, I had the TV on for ‘noise company’ and with half of my mind watched a pretty stupid show while the other half of my brain engaged in a book. I’m not going to tell you what the show was because it was that stupid – cheesy acting, poor scriptwriting, a dumb storyline, and in spite of all that, still too scary!

(Did I cancel out the negative points of watching a stupid show by the fact that I was reading Henri Nouwen? Unfortunately, I doubt it.)

Here’s a basic outline of the program: an evil virus began to overtake the entire world. One by one, ordinary people were being transformed into hideous, zombie-like monsters. These zombies then turned on the rest of the population. Their only goal was to stay alive (stay undead?), and to do this, they fed on others (I told you this was creepy). They were terrifying, and really, really, really ugly. What was worse is that there seemed to be no antidote to the virus.

Then, some science-y guy made a discovery: the blood of one man, half-alien, was the only thing that would stop the spread of the virus. What’s more, the hero’s blood could actually reverse the effects of the virus. The only problem was that for the scientists to be able to extract this man’s blood, he had to die.

‘Lightbulb!’

The parallels to the gospel story were at once incredibly obvious. I guess the writers were scratching around for new story ideas and decided to re-hash one that is very old. No surprises there. But what stood out to me was how amazingly apt the zombie virus is as a picture of sin’s work in our lives. Sin is infectious. It has spread to the whole world. And it turns its victims into flesh-devouring monsters, doing whatever it will take to keep itself alive. Its whole point is itself, and it doesn’t care about how ugly it becomes, if only it can stay alive. Oddly enough, though, that’s not really living.

In the TV show, the antidote didn’t miraculously turn the victims into super-people; they were still going to make mistakes and they’d still succumb to the occasional cold or flu. Rather, the miracle was that the hero’s blood saved the people from a life of living death.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that without the sacrifice of Jesus, I’m just a crazed zombie feeding on the flesh – basically, a dead girl walking.

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Conversations:

Jessica -- :D House Jr. is pretty cute, too!

Cara -- thank you, lovely friend! Naming inanimate objects is one of my weird quirks :).

Samantha R -- solidarity! It's fun to name things :).

Elisabeth -- thank you, lovely lady!

Rebecca Simon -- yes, pictures shall be forthcoming!

Mitanika -- ooh, I confess I quite love 'houseling'. Good call!

Asea -- oh voice of the masses, your wish is my command! Photos soon :).