Tonight, I am going to watch “Breaking Dawn, Part 1” with
some friends. Here’s my confession time:
I haven’t gone to see any of the other movies since the first “Twilight”
film. I am not a “Twi-hard” and don’t even
really hold any allegiance to either the “Twilight” or “Potter” camps. I simply enjoyed the first book in the
Twilight series, and then got excited when the first movie was released in
theaters. Then, after I saw the movie, I
was pretty unimpressed, and decided I wouldn’t waste my or my husband’s hard
earned money on the other movies.
I am in no way trying to insult the movies, or the book
series. I actually started re-reading
the books last week, and finally understood why I didn’t enjoy the movies: the
actor that plays Edward looks nothing like the Edward I pictured while taking
in the story. I’m not saying Robert
Pattinson isn’t good looking, but he isn’t the actor I would have chosen to
portray the male lead in this story. If
I were choosing, the first, and obvious pick would be this man:
However, my husband has no dreams of going to Hollywood any
time soon. I’m actually okay with that,
since I happen to have a jealous streak and hate the idea of fighting off
fangirls that are drooling over the man I married. I guess my second choices for actors would be
between Ian Somerhalder and Jared Leto (these names deserve to be Googled,
trust me).
SO, with all that being said, and all those tangents
traveled, I had a fairly big realization the other day while reading through
the third book, “Eclipse.” I’m always
amazed at the seemingly random chances that God uses to teach me a powerful lesson. There was a section in one of the middle
chapters that describes the budding relationship between one of the characters
and a girl he had “imprinted” on. It’s
hard to describe what imprinting means in the context of the book without you
reading the series, so we’ll just say she’s his soulmate. Here’s the section that impacted me so
strongly:
“The whole pack was there: Sam with his Emily, Paul, Embry,
Quil, and Jared with Kim, the girl he’d imprinted upon.
My first impression of Kim was that she was a nice girl, a
little shy, and a little plain. She had
a wide face, mostly cheekbones, with eyes too small to balance them out. Her nose and mouth were both too broad for
traditional beauty. Her flat black hair
was thin and wispy in the wind that never seemed to let up atop the cliff.
That was my first impression. But after a few hours of watching Jared watch
Kim, I could no longer find anything plain about the girl.
The way he stared at her!
It was like a blind man seeing the sun for the first time. Like a collecter finding an undiscovered Da
Vinci, like a mother looking in the face of her newborn child.
His wondering eyes made me see new things about her – how her
skin looked like russet-colored silk in the firelight, how the shape of her
lips was a perfect double curve, how white her teeth were against them, how
long her eyelashes were, brushing her cheek when she looked down. (Meyer, Stephanie. Eclipse. New York: Little Brown and
Company, 2007. P. 242)”
Here’s the realization that forced me to set my book down in
the middle of reading, my eyes cloudy with tears: that’s how God looks at
us. It is so easy to look at myself in
the mirror, and see the imperfections.
In a purely aesthetic definition of beauty, it is easy for me to pick
out my flaws. But when I consider “how
wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge
(Ephesians 3:18b-19a),” then all I can focus on is how He sees me. I can’t even see how undeserving I am when my
vision is filled with how loved I am, and how incredible He is.
To take this thought one step further, isn’t that how we
should see other people? Instead of looking
at someone and picking out all the ways they’re different from myself, I should
be looking at them with the mindset that they are also loved by God. Instead of creating reasons for division, I
should be focused on the most important aspect in all of life: the fact that we
are desperately, intensely, perfectly, inconcevably loved by our Creator. If only the world could see that fact!
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