I thank you

I’ve been thinking of the old Sam and Dave song (or ZZ Top depending on your musical preferences). I think it is appropriate for the Thanksgiving Holy day. It has been a prayer of thanks for me for as long as I can remember: You didn’t have to love me like you did but you did yes you did and I thank you.

I don’t deserve anything I have, even the air that I breathe. In an age of rights and selfishness it is good to be reminded that what we deserve when it comes down to it is death. Of course that is an alien concept to most people these days. You can say that everybody knows their true condition and it is true but applied theology is so much more complicated than theoretical theology. Too often we underrate the ability of people when it comes to suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. We can be really good at it. I know from my own experience that it is possible to suppress the truth of your own life so deeply and thoroughly that events can cease to exist to you on the conscious level. And those are natural everyday sort of things. If you can do that with trauma and the events of the finite world how easy would it be to put aside spiritual things which are invisible to the eye? How difficult would it be to remember them? Impossible apart from the grace of God.

I know this, it is a suppression of truth that can’t be removed by shear logic or reason. It has to be the result of the paradigm shift of faith. You have to be given the eyes to see. That is the essence of grace.

And that is one thing for which I am very thankful. By the grace of God my eyes have been opened so that I can get a clearer glimpse of who I really am without God. That is the most precious gift in all the world to me because I was blind to that for a long, long time. It is that vision that causes me to press forward into repentance and to long for the path of life. I was a walking dead man for a long, long time and I didn’t know it.

I've been reading the Walking Dead series of comics lately and as a result I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a Zombie novel but with a twist. I would be set in a world that is made of Zombies that look like everyday ordinary people. Life goes on in the everyday sort of way but every once in a while someone will begin to see things with new eyes and they will begin to see that they are nothing more than walking dead and they will turn from death to life. And the Zombies will shun them.

Most of us don’t have the eyes to see it but that really is what our world is made of. We are a planet of walking dead – happy, contented, entertained zombies and our only hope is that we be given new eyes; eyes that will see the world the way it really is, eyes that can discern between death and life, and heart that will then begin to yearn for life more than anything in the whole world. That is our only hope.

It is true God didn’t have to love us but he did: While we were yet Zombies Christ died for us.

I thank God on this Holy day that we have a glorious escape route from Zombieland.

May you be given eyes to see the difference between death and life.

Brad