It's All In Your Head: Twilight Uncovered!

This whole day I have been thinking about this notion of warfare going on that we can't see. Of course, I have heard this before, but for some reason, the explanation it poses for evil and an all-loving God to co-exist, has been radical to me. It's helped me in just the last 24 hours, think and see this world differently. I am really excited about the clarity that I feel like this "warfare worldview," as Greg Boyd calls it, is bringing me. I think it speaks to how humanity is, very well, and the everyday evils we are faced with. So with that being said, I had a thought about this other realm.

I am a huge Twilight fan. If my son's name wasn't proof of that, then I don't know what is. I am a 26 year old fan with two kids, not a 13 year old fan with braces, so I've wondered what is the appeal for me, the adult fan? In a conversation with my mom, I figured it out. Sure I thought the love story was interesting, sure I thought that Edward and Jacob were dreamy, sure I thought that it was a great action-packed adventure, and yes, I did wait in line to see the movies for hours and hours on end... but so did the crazy teenagers. What was different for me- and maybe other adult fans out there?

I'm going to say loving Twilight as an adult is different because we see and understand the world differently than tweens. If I am being super honest, I want to believe that there really is whole world surrounding our reality that we don't see, and I think stories like Twilight speak to that deep longing. This series puts a fictional world of creatures, good and evil, epic battles, and intense love, into a concrete example that makes it feel like non-fiction, giving me the power and imagination to hope that maybe, just maybe a realm like that, really does exist around us. Did you not wish that there were really vampires and werewolves fighting to protect mankind? Did you not want to believe in the Volturi, and that there are crazy power battles we don't see, and most of all, do you not want to believe that we humans, are capable of amazing things full of incredible purpose and meaning, like Bella? I SO wish that was true! I found myself captivated by this series of books because I want to believe that there really are things going on that we can't see, that we have an important part in even if we don't know what it is yet. Somehow, that seems to be the only thing that fits in explaining why there are some things that can't be explained.

Maybe there really is this spiritual world of good and evil, battling it out in our defense, and though we will obviously struggle to physically see it, our psyche and soul are screaming it does exist through our songs, stories, and art. We are begging to believe that there is more than what we see, and though there are likely parts of this unseen world that are evil and terrifying, we also know that there are good and just beings working on our behalf as well, and that somehow we are an integral part of that world. The story of Twilight does an excellent job explaining what our rational and logical minds can't with simple words. That is why I love this story so much! It proves to me that we do long for what we can't see, and that there is a bigger picture at play than we even are aware of. It's not just humanity and the earth working through things, it's the entire cosmos, it's everything that's ever existed. When I can put Twilight into those terms, I can separate myself from the 13 year old fan who just wants Jacob to keep taking off his shirt- which there's nothing wrong with, by the way :)

Here are few pictures from our family's adventure to Forks last March. The experience was awesome, and brought us a little closer to our hope that this story, or something like it, is real...