For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. -John 3:16
“Please be careful not to fall in love with your ideas. Because then you will hate the world.” -Jay Rosen
My little brother recently got me somewhat hooked on the TV show The Walking Dead. Just in case you are unfamiliar with the show, here’s the gist: zombie apocalypse. Don’t get bit.
It’s a pretty gross show, to be perfectly honest. More like really incredibly gross. But it’s just so compelling to follow the main characters as they deal with their life under these constraining circumstances. In thinking about the world through the lens of this super-evil-terrifying zombie apocalypse, I’m coming to think about our world a little differently.
For example, the main characters have to struggle with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any hope. Evil is all around them—they have a legitimate claim on the “worst time to be alive in the history of the world” title. One wrong move and BAM. Walking dead. Add to that the normal dangers of life (sickness, accident, weather), and things start to get sticky really quickly.
One particular character refuses to believe that the zombies are beyond hope. He holds out for a cure, collecting and feeding zombies in the hopes that someday they’ll come back.
He’s wrong. They aren’t getting better. Spending time with them isn’t only foolish, but it’s quite dangerous.
Sometimes I wonder if all our talk about living in the worst time in the history of the world, with the most evil ever all around us, doesn’t turn our lives into The Walking Dead. It’s Us vs. Them: we’re faithful believers who live the Word of Wisdom and Law of Chastity and read our scriptures and go to church, and They will eat our spiritual faces off if we give them even one inch. Not a lot of room for compassion here.
In this view, the reason missionary work is so hard is that you’re trying to spread a cure that zombies don’t even want to take.
And the idea of making the world a better place overall? Well forget about it. There is no hope. It ain’t going to get better until the Second Coming, and even then things are going to be rough for most everyone.
The thing is, I don’t think this is a very Mormon way of viewing the world.
Remember, the idea of making the world a better place overall is Jesus’s life’s work. Only a few days of His life were actually recorded, and most of those were spent serving sinners and loving outcasts. The Second coming will be most rough, I believe, on those who think only of the afterlife and neglect their stewardships here.
Missionary work, in this view, is difficult because it involves getting to know people, serving them where they’re at, and accepting their decisions no matter what and truly loving them regardless.
Don’t get me wrong—the world has a lot of evil these days. And while I’m not sure it maxes out the evilometer more than any other epoch, I’m not really concerned about that. We are all a little evil, and we’re all a little good. We’re fellow patients wandering around the hospital of life, each with our own inevitable maladies, the most Christlike among us doing their best at making the children in the next room laugh.
Cultivating radical compassion toward other people, whether Mormons or musicians or socialists or Norwegians, isn’t only worth our while, but it’s the whole point of life.
We are all sick, and we don’t have to hold out for a cure. We’ve got it, and Jesus made it abundantly clear what that cure is: love. Someday He’ll come back, but if we’ve been spreading His love around it won’t be that big a shocker.
Life is really sticky, and it flat out sucks sometimes. That’s why our hope lies in helping each other—we all know our Heavenly Parents help us most often through our neighbors, and so as we reach out to our neighbors we spread our Parents’ hope and combat the evil that is inside each of us.
Seeing life through this lens helps to see it the way our Heavenly Parents do. Their kids are all in this together, and just because some of them sin differently than some of the others doesn’t mean anything. We’re all struggling with life in our own way, and we all have constraining circumstances that make our lives unique.
I guess the gist of what I’m trying to say is this: life isn’t a zombie apocalypse.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. -John 3:16
“Please be careful not to fall in love with your ideas. Because then you will hate the world.”
-Jay Rosen
Amen.
One of the best analogies I’ve read in a long time. Thanks.
I do like “the Walking Dead.” Most because of the metaphors it subtly presents. And it has really great-gross special effects. I think the underlying theme is perspective. The ugliness in the world is magnified for the show, represented by the walkers. Each character reacts to that reality in there own way, based on their world-view, there’s a lot to learn there.