ZOMBIES IN OUR MIDST

(Red Deer Advocate, June 28, 2008.) Here’s a picture of some fashionable dude walking down a catwalk in Milan or some place like that. There is a time to subject a person to ridicule: when that person is being ridiculous. Odds are that this model will never read what he made possible for me to write. But should he stumble upon this article, very well. Then he might be inspired to ‘man-up,’ as they say. Should a man allow designers to make him look like a frankenstein on estrogen supplements? Is it not easy enough to appear freakish in this fallen world without fabricating more of it to put on?

It isn’t just the models who thoughtlessly plod through life being whatever they are told to be. At the mall I see the zombied boys being pulled along by their precocious girls. I see all the cars lined up in the left hand lane waiting for several lights’ time to get to that mall, about a dozen drivers in a row not thinking enough to turn left a couple of intersections back to avoid the traffic jam. Remember the year teenage girls wore soothers around their necks ‘just because’—just because some celebrity, no doubt, told them, by example, to do it? Look at all the boys, some above the age of twenty, going through contortions to keep their pants drooping down below their underwear without having them fall to the ground. Look at them waddle like ducks, and tell me this is normal! Tell me they’re not zombies, and chances are you are one yourself. And what about these men who go around saying, ‘Let me ask the boss’ for fear of doing something without the wife’s consent? These are the most pathetic zombies of all! They must act like the henpecked sissies they’ve become because they’re convinced that we must change with the times, no matter what that change involves, even if it means that men may no longer be men!

For those of us who no longer regard ‘the times’ as the determining factor for what we believe and how we think, speak, and act, we can cite instances of zombie-like behavior from our past. I recall being at my dad’s grave beside the shovels. Like a zombie marching the way I was programmed to march, I did not seriously deliberate about what I was craving with all my heart to do. And so the traditional gravedigger, a stranger probably, got to bury the father who should have been buried by his three sons.

Before we follow the herd or run with the pack, we should inquire about the wisdom of our age to find out what sort it is. Our herd mentality might be a sign that we are unthinking persons on the broad way that leads to destruction (Matthew 7.13.) When you become converted to truth, Jesus Christ, and reason, you begin to think for yourself and to question what you do and why you do it. Is it natural for a man to cower before a woman? To wear his pants down in public? These are signs, my friends, of a mentality that is twisted against nature, reason, decency, and God. Men must be woken up from their zombie sleep. Then they must separate themselves from the zombies that remain, take Jesus’ advice, and ‘let the dead bury their dead’ (Matthew 8.22.) The man who follows Jesus will be neither a sissy nor a brute. Like Jesus, he will rebuke his own mother when she’s out of place, and he’ll reach out to the lepers of society out of compassion. This man will not be afraid to overturn a tradition or spurn a fad that is contrary to righteousness. ‘By faith in his name’ it is possible to pick up the cross and follow Jesus and his iconoclastic, trend-breaking lifestyle. This is the narrow way that leads to life—everlasting life.