I heard the general plot line of the Twilight series for the first time today. A Christian teenage girl told me. It didn’t leave me shocked. There’s not much they write about now that hasn’t been written about before. What it did do is make me think a little bit.
Why is our Christian teen/young adult culture wrapped up in these stories just as much as the world? Why would they sooner sit down and read a chapter of Eclipse than a chapter out of Job? Why are they more entranced with the narration of Hollywood than the narration of the Man from Galilee? Why will they wait till the movie’s over before rushing to the bathroom when they can hardly keep their eyes open during church?
For that matter, why will we?
What is it that’s got a hold of our hearts?
We’ve lost the practice of guarding ourselves. We don’t guard our eyes; we don’t guard our ears; we don’t guard our stomachs. The only thing we do a decent job of guarding is our pocket books, but even that’s out on Black Friday. We’ve forgotten how to guard our hearts.
“Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” So, you lose your heart, you lose life. The scent of the winter snow doesn’t cut it anymore; you need an actual taste. Simple, honest words won’t satisfy; you want poetry a little more like Shakespeare. The God who loves you isn’t tangible enough; you look for romance that’s a little more spicy. You’re not being blatantly rebellious. You’re just looking for life. Who wants to be bored all the time?
I’m not ranting about the evils of stories like Twilight. What I am trying to say is this: We’ve got a lot of kids out there - good, church-going, Christian kids - who know the story of Bella and Edward a whole lot better than they know their Bibles. And they find it a lot more fascinating too. Why are they being captivated by vampires and not by Jesus? Is it really possible to be captivated by both? What do they see when they look at you? Are you showing them a God of big sticks and straight-backed pews? Or a Man who lived and died and rose again and knows a whole lot more about love than Edward ever will?
