here’s a li’l tasty appetizer from my brand new book, Hopecasting: Finding, Keeping and Sharing the Things Unseen…

The 2013 zombie film Warm Hearts was extremely unique for this weird film genre: it’s a zombie love story. I remember watching it on a trans-Pacific flight in the middle of the night, having not heard of it before finding it on my seat-back on-demand video screen. And I remember being very pleasantly surprised.

The film’s tag line summarizes the plot, in a sense: He’s still dead, but he’s getting warmer. Basically, it’s the story of a zombie guy whose heart gets a super tiny jump-start when he sees a live (non-zombie) young woman. He ends up saving her, and they’re forced to spend a bunch of time together in his proto-hipster bachelor pad while the zombie hordes move on by. But, of course, she begins to see the flickers of life in him just as he starts to feel them in himself. And love ensues! Yay!

What I found particularly unique about this zombie movie is that it was not about gore or horror or creative sound and visual effects (which are called for, I suppose, when the script calls for the eating of humans). At its heart (ha!), Warm Hearts is a film about feeling. It’s not-so-subtle message is “to be dead is to feel nothing; even those who no longer feel anything can come back to life, to feeling.” There’s also a subtle message, an exploration of the soulless zombies that only commodify others for consumption, and how some of the nonzombies in the film fit that description just as easily. Hopeless people are hollow people, zombie or not, and they use others to stave off their emptiness.

In my own mini-exile, I came face to face with the fact that I had developed a zombie soul. In order to press through a horrendous season of life, I had shut down my feelings. And while the soul and feelings are not synonymous, I’m not sure it’s possible to have a vibrant soul without authentic feelings. They’re both symbiotic prerequisites of one another.

Lots of people, I’ve found, live with a zombie soul. They’re going through the movements of life. They may even be going through the movements of a spiritual life. But there’s no blood pumping. And there is—by choice or external force—a complete shutting down of honest feelings.

In my own little way, I lived the story of R, the zombie in Warm Hearts. The rekindling of my soul was a love interest, just like his. But it wasn’t a girl. My love interest—the gentle and present heart sparker of my story—was none other than the Creator of my heart.