Sunday, November 20, 2011

Random Theological Inspiration found in the pages of a Twilight book


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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