World War Z

Before World War Z opened in the theaters, I ignored the jokes about another zombie movie, considering them yet another way to work zombies into conversational chatter.  I assumed World War Z was going to be an apocalyptic movie about the final war on earth. After all, the letter Z is the last letter in the alphabet.

Last year, one of the most intelligent AP English students in my class asked me to give him a poem about zombies to analyze, promising to write a fabulous essay if I did. And I complied. Poems about zombies aren’t that hard to find today.

But when we went to the movies last week to watch World War Z, I was surprised to see it was actually a movie about zombies, and when they started attacking people all over the earth, I laughed. Not at them, but at me. For hearing, but not listening.  

God, however, can use anything to speak to us if we’ll listen, even if it’s a movie about zombies!

In my case, I started thinking about the times people tell me something, but I don’t actually treat what they have to say as truth; instead, I shrug it off as idle chatter, listening in a zombie-like trance, nodding in agreement while looking them straight in the eye as my mind wanders to a thousand different places -- waiting for a report on a biopsy or wondering if I sent my husband to work with enough lunch or even wishing it was last summer and I was back in South Africa on safari!

Superficial, trance-like, zombified listening.

It’s hard to “spur one another on toward love” (Hebrews 10:24 NIV), if I’m not really listening to the words that are said.    

I need to do it better.