Twilight

Boys, girls, doesn’t really matter. They are looking for the same thing; the only difference is in where they try to find it. They want to be loved, to feel important, and to be valued. They want to feel whole. In the end, it is God they are looking for, but instead of going to the real thing, they head to one another.

I know that God made Adam and said, “it isn’t good for man to be alone,” so He made Eve to complete Adam. It kind of fits then that man would look to woman and woman to man to find their completer. So maybe before the fall, Adam and Eve did fully make one whole. In their complete state, they could have perfect fellowship with one another, as they walked with God. But since then, things haven’t gone so well in the completeness realm, and when a boy looks to a girl to perfect him, he tends to look at a girl, not walk with the girl. And when a girl runs to a guy to find her whole self, she tends to make him her everything and that just doesn’t work in a fallen world.

The newest rage among young girls is the Twilight series. It is marketed to teens as a wonderful romance. Now boys aren’t going to read about the beautiful Edward, the one who perfectly, and self-sacrificially loves Bella. No, this series of novels is solely for the consumption of teen girls, who believe that prince charming is real. In Twilight, they are sold on a prince who willingly denies himself, for the well-being of his beloved. He overcomes his own temptations and desires to keep her safe and wholly undefiled. Bella, the heroine, is constantly in danger and her beloved Edward is always there to save her, even when he isn’t there. He lives in her mind at times, a type of memory always guiding, always protecting.

Sounds great right, a guy who isn’t after that “one” thing. A guy who places his love for a woman above his own selfish desires, who could ask for anything more? I mean, he sounds like he is right out of a Barlowgirl song, but there is a catch. Wonderful, beautiful, noble Edward is a vampire. His desire for Bella is not sexual as much as it is carnivorous. He wants to eat his darling Bella, and on a few occasions has to run out of the room to keep from killing her. Not exactly, the kind of guy we want to see our daughter bring home for dinner, but Edward Cullen is the hero of these books.

He and his “family” are good vampires. They abstain from human flesh and hunt animals to feed their blood thirsty appetite. This ability to overcome their nature is one of the books most compelling narratives. Edward is a man who sincerely loves, and Bella is overwhelmed by how much he cares about her. He is all a girl could want; that is if she is not bothered by the fact that he is a walking corpse. When Bella describes his touch, she says it is cold and hard. Edward finds peace and rest in the warmth that lives inside Bella, the lifeblood that flows through her veins, and that is one of the reasons he will not make her into a vampire. He also believes that vampires are the undead, and therefore damned. In his uprightness, he refuses to condemn Bella to eternal damnation.

Edward has a noble character, and if it was simply that he were a vampire, the books might not be seen as harmful to the virtue of teen girls. But the books don’t leave Bella and Edward at that warm, romantic level. There is no actual sex between these two characters in the first book, but the sensual sparks that fly between them stir emotions and feelings that are best left to the marriage bed. Edward’s breathe on Bella’s hair, Bella’s warmth against Edward’s chest, their constant physical closeness and discovery could cause sensations to arise in a young teen’s body that would best be left unstimulated.

But that stimulation is what drives girls to run from store to store looking for the next book in the series. They are driven by Edward’s perfection and want Bella to find more of him in the next book. One fourteen year old, I was with at a girls day at the mall kept asking if the mall had a bookstore because she needed to buy the next book. She was consumed the whole day by her desire to join a world of darkness because she had become so deeply attached to the characters.
We would never willingly buy soft porn for our sons to keep under their beds, to fill their minds with false images of women, who are airbrushed copies of the real thing. Why would we buy books for our daughters that fill their minds with unrealistic imitations of the real thing?

When Adam and Eve fell, they lost their ability to complete one another. They no longer had a perfect relationship with one another, because they no longer walked in complete wholeness with God. They were missing their center, they were missing their God, and that is when they started to look to one another to meet their most basic need for relationship. A need that in their imperfect state, neither could ever satisfy and it is because that need is so strong that the Twilight series is doing so well, that is why lonely women watch Soap Operas daily, that is why pornography is rampant in the lives of our men.

Men and women try to meet that need for intimate relationship, and when their lover fails to meet it, they look elsewhere, believing there was a deficiency in the one they were with, but the deficiency is not with their lover. No, it is with them. Jesus is the lover we are looking for in books, in movies, in relationships, in photographs. Apart from an intimate, living, passionate relationship with Him, there is no other relationship that will ever complete any of us.