Excited by Roadkill

What a disturbing title for a post, you might be thinking.

You have a point there.

What's even more disturbing is at the moment, it's kinda true.

Now before you add 'crazy psycho maniac' to the list of things that you think I am, let me explain.

Remember this post: Stop doing dead things!? (Haha, another interesting title, I won't lie!)

In that particular post, I looked at Ephesians 2:1-5 which talks about how we've been raised from being dead in our transgressions to being alive in Christ. Now it just so happened that the day we looked at it in our bible study group, my co-leader had just ridden over a squirrel. With her bike. Front wheel and back.

Gross.

But what a great illustration! We don't like to think of death, and indeed our culture is one which removes and hides any evidence of death. Ernst Becker, a philosopher/writer, goes so far as to hypothesise "that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality" (Wikipedia).

Yet, no matter how hard we try to run away from it, death is everywhere. And if your driving is as bad as mine is, you'll definitely see Death's obvious hand in the roadkill left littering the roads behind you.

Okay, bad joke. My driving isn't that bad. However, the idea is that roadkill IS a visual, obvious, unavoidable picture of the ugliness, the inevitability, the unavoidability, the futility, the nothingness, the deadness of death.

Fortunately, the story doesn't end there. My friend said that when she looked back from her bike, the squirrel wasn't there on the road. It must've bounced off, happily still alive. And in a way, our rebirth as Christians is like a reverse roadkill incident. We start off as flattened, blobs of maggotty, fleshy, dead, unrecognisable messes, and in Christ we become bouncey jumpy alive squirrels.

I dare you not to get excited by roadkill after that thought!