Zombies

I know about the body. I know about the smell and decay and worms and shredded clothes and the crazed look you get in your eyes. I know how your thoughts turn again and again to flesh. The cravings come over you without warning, and you find yourself stalking your fellow man again and again. I know.

And I know the prayers you say hoping that you’ll be better tomorrow, that somehow, maybe you can cover it all up with flowers in your hair or makeup over your pocked skin or new clothes that might hide the blood still dripping from your mouth. But it never works. Does it? So you think yourself a muddy footprint, a stupid sheep, a failed attempt, garbage.

But that is not how I see you. I never saw you that way, not when you were born and not ever. So stop looking at that.

Remember. You are alive. Inside that corpse of death, I have revived the cold, hard heart. It beats. It burns. It radiates. 

It was rotting but now it’s alive, and I have made you fully human again. I am not ashamed of you or that corpse that you must operate until the end of your days. I know its encumbrances. I do not hold it against you. It is not you anymore anyway. Once it was all you had, but now it brings you back here again and again. Back to remembering the beating, burning, radiating light inside you. That is me.

You are my masterpiece, my workmanship, my temple, and the praise of my glory. You are my body. My body, worthy and complete, the place where I myself live so you live too. Nothing can hinder my spreading that pulsing, beating, burning light to the rest of you. Yes, to all of you because you are worth saving. 

You are worth freewill gone awry in the garden. You are worth the rebels' deaths in a flood. You are worth the preservation of my wandering people. You are worth the wars made to clear a space. You are worth the death of my prophets and you are worth the spit in my face.

It was my choice. My choice to give up all to give you what I have. I want to see you there with me, so I am bringing you in.

Stop looking at that carcass. Stop thinking of all that you should be doing to make yourself right and loved and lovely. See. I have done it already. You are.

Now live as only a son or daughter of mine can. Live alive.

"And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 

But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is a gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." Ephesians 2:1-10