The Undead Part Of You

It would rarely be said that it is difficult to find differences between living, breathing human beings…and undead, flesh-consuming zombies. For one thing, if you see someone eating a brain…

…probably a zombie.

But under the surface of dietary preferences lie many subtle differences that show the vastly disparate lifestyles of these two groups. And when you start to look deeper, it becomes radically obvious that being human is the way to go.

But why? Why when we analyze these things do we feel, deep in our gut, that we have the preferred lives?

Simply put, we prefer it because we are built to long for the things that make us human.

If you are breathing, but wish you were not…something is amiss.

If you are hungry, but do not seek food…something is awry.

If you are in love with someone, but refuse to show that person that you are…something is broken.

The things in life that bring us joy bring us joy because we were made to enjoy them. It may sound roundabout and repetitive, but think about it for a moment. If we were not creatures made to need food, we would not care to seek it out, nor would eating make us feel good. If we were not creatures made to love, we would be perfectly fine isolating ourselves in a room alone forever, and could live our whole lives happily never speaking to another person.

But we are creatures made to eat, and made to love. And when we see people forsaking these things, that little buzzer goes off in our head that something isn’t right. There must be some reason that this person is not actively pursuing a meal or a friendship because no normal, sane person would be alright living hungry and alone.

And so when we really start to look at zombies, we really start to see that they are creatures absent of all but one of those things humans were made to experience.

They eat. That’s it.

Not only is that it, but it could be argued that they have been stripped of the ability to enjoy it. Their brains just continue to fire through the same synapses it did while the person was alive, but in a far more limited, and inhuman, way.

We can look to zombies for how not to live. If there is a part of your life that you know you should normally be enjoying but aren’t, odds are that right now you are experiencing that thing more like a zombie than a human. If the things you are doing once brought you joy and now aren’t, those things have quite possibly become undead.

And whereas some people would tell you not to worry, to find other things to bring you joy, God would say something is wrong.

He would say “I have specially built you to enjoy immensely these things…and when you are not happy doing them, it not only makes me sad, it makes you less of the person that I know you can be.”

He would say “You are not experiencing life the way I intended it to be. And only you can make the choice to return to that joy. For joy forced is not real joy. Love out of volition is slavery.”

What parts of your life are undead right now? How much better would your life be if all those things were reclaimed in the fullness of joy for which they were made?