This post brought to you by The Walking Dead.

Seems a little incongruent, huh?  Zombies and feminism have nothing to do with each other and neither do zombies and Thanksgiving.  Do they?  Well, in this warped space called My Mind, there actually is a connection between them all.  The Feminism connection will have to wait until next week.

As I was walking on the treadmill this morning, I was watching an episode from Season 2 of The Walking Dead and thinking. Ideas started popping into My Mind, forcing me to pause the episode so I could shakily type in notes in my iPad, not once, but twice.  (It was quite difficult to do at a 3.5 mph speed on a 2* incline, plus, if you know me and how I can fall down in an empty field, you'd know it was actually quite dangerous for me to even try to type and walk at the same time.  Yet, I managed to not fall off the treadmill, drop my iPad or do any bodily harm to myself.)

I was thinking about how I was surrounded by violence: my book on the Civil war; Lincoln - the movie and the tragic ending of his life; the events in the Middle East; and watching this tv show.  All this was bookended by my remembering how violence was a theme of the minor Old Testament prophets I had studied.  God held their violence towards each other against the Israelites.  Then I realized it was kind of ironic that God would then use violence via the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans to punish the Israelites. I know that if we are a people of violence, which mankind has been since Cain killed Abel, God will speak our language back to us, if for no other reason than to get our attention.   I don't believe in coincidences, so I knew these thoughts in My Mind would culminate into some grand epiphany, to the point in the episode I was watching to this dialogue:

"Does God exist?"  Glenn asked Maggie.

There is no doubt in My Mind He does, in fact, exist. And I am thankful He Is.  No matter what violence in going on around me or that I am watching, He is there in it all, orchestrating it all for His Purposes, purposes I do not and cannot always fathom.

I continued watching the episode and kind of stopped thinking about the other stuff.  And then, there was this dialogue:

"Do you forgive me?" Dale asked Andrea.  (And there was a desperation in his voice, a fear, a hesitancy.)

"I'm trying," Andrea replied.

Thank you God, that You forgive me immediately, with no hesitancy and that I can ask with no fear that You will not NOT forgive me.  (And throw the things I need to ask forgiveness for, my sin, as far as the east is from the west and remember them no more.)  Grace offered freely.

The turkey may come out dry.  The rolls might burn.  The pecan pie might have salt instead of sugar. All of that is overshadowed by the thankfulness in my heart for that Grace, offered and given freely, but accepted, surprisingly, hesitantly.