Touched by a Vampire (10 page)

In fact, God uses weak things in a special way and acts in ways we don’t expect. Specifically, God acted by becoming
human for us. Being human is a weak thing, but God entered into this mess with us to show us how much He cares. We read in the first chapter of the gospel of John that “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory…” (verse 14).

All through history, people have wondered how something so strange, so weak, could be true. How could a majestic and mysterious God become human? How could the holy God of Israel be born and cry, have ten fingers and toes, or enjoy a fish dinner? We’re talking about a God who is so glorious and tremendous that people knew better than to even say His name out loud. How could a God like that be known the way Jesus’s friends and disciples knew Him? God in the flesh seems weak and foolish. Flesh is as weak as it gets, after all. Flesh disappoints. It betrays us. Being flesh means we suffer and die.

Paul wants us to recognize how fabulous this is. While it seems like a contradiction to believe that the powerful Creator of the universe came to us as a tiny baby, Paul positively glories in this. It
is
astounding that God would become flesh, which makes it all the more wonderful, all the more full of grace. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God is in no danger of being damaged by dwelling fully with us in our weakness.

The incarnation of Jesus is
the
shining example of how God gives us good gifts in the middle of weak, ordinary life.

Christian thinkers have often taken another step here. If God is so good as to join us in the middle of our human mess, then this should change the way we deal with the mess.

Because God jumped into our mess, our weakness, we have to approach that mess differently. We can look at our limits, and instead of figuring that we’d better work hard to overcome those limits, we can think about the sweet gifts God gives us in the middle of weakness and limitation. Yes, we are weak and ordinary. But Jesus jumped into that weakness and ordinariness with us. That means we can find God’s gifts in the middle of everyday, ordinary life.

We don’t have to have “perfect,” ideal families for our homes to be places where God can do good work. Our families don’t have to be beautiful, well-scrubbed, always smiling folks constantly ready to be photographed for the cover of some magazine called
Your Perfect Life Today
. This doesn’t mean it’s all right for our parents to hurt us or for us to hurt our children or brothers or sisters. It does mean, though, that God loves ordinary, everyday people—people who fail each other and disappoint each other.

The truth is that being a family is hard. Living with other people is hard. Sometimes it’s relatively easy to be kind—or at least to tolerate—people at work or school. After all, we only have to see those people for a few hours at a stretch. But you can’t escape family. You have to see them each and every day. You have to share the bathroom and the kitchen. Every single
day, you notice if they leave toothpaste in the sink or eat the last bagel, the one you wanted for breakfast. If a family member gets sick, another family member will take care of her. Have you ever changed a diaper or cleaned up after a sick child? Have you figured out how to love your brother or sister even when that brother or sister is in a really different place than you?

The weakness of ordinary family life gives all of us an opportunity to care for each other, to love each other even when it’s difficult. This kind of opportunity can be a real gift from God, who uses these opportunities to show us how love works.

The grace of weakness frees us from trying to be something we are not. It frees us to love our parents or children or spouses even when we find out they’re not superhuman. It frees us to take care of each other when we’re tired or cranky or just plain annoyed. It frees us to accept the love of our ordinary, disappointing families instead of wishing for something that isn’t real.

It’s because of who Jesus is and what He has done that our own weakness can be used for God’s power. Ordinary things matter to God. Weak things matter to God. Instead of longing for a kind of perfection we don’t have, we can think about the ways God uses us in our weakness.

If God loves weak, ordinary people and families, what should we do with the idealized family represented by the Cullens?
Shouldn’t we still try to move toward that ideal? To be people who don’t fail one another? Who love each other through thick and thin?

Well, yes and no. God does, often, give us the strength to be better families than we would otherwise have been, but God doesn’t do this by taking away our disappointing families and replacing them with some impossible ideal. God gives us strength
through
our ordinary lives, not instead of our ordinary lives.

More importantly, God frees us from having to put our hope in an impossible ideal of a family, an ideal that can never be achieved. Christians recognize that the things wrong with the world—with us as individuals and with our families—are big things. Bigger than we could ever fix on our own. From a position of weakness, we receive the good news that only Jesus Christ can fix all that is broken.

Because Christian hope is firmly in Jesus Christ and no one else, we have no need for perfect families to save us. Since our families are all flawed, human, and weak, this is very good news indeed.

But wait, aren’t Christians interested in family values? Don’t we hope that our families are places where God’s goodness and love are shared? Places where the world can see that goodness and love?

We do hope for God to transform our families, but we have to put our hope in the right place. Hope is in Jesus, not in our parents or children. We should be warned, then, against idealizing the family. Pictures of perfect families offer false hope. They can make us dissatisfied with our own families when those families are doing the best they can in the midst of weakness. They can lead us to try to force our family life into a kind of perfect mold and thus rob us of the freedom to experience God’s grace through imperfection.

Author Amy Laura Hall talks about a “sense a woman carries with her that she, and her home and family, are surrounded by and being scrutinized by the images of perfect domesticity they find in the pages of popular magazines.”
⁴
Have you felt the pressure to make your life or your family life conform to some image of perfection? It can be so crippling, so tyrannical, to live constantly with this sense of being scrutinized.

Hall suggests that we think about the ways messy, imperfect, normal families are actually much better witnesses to God’s goodness and grace than perfect, airbrushed families could ever be. Messy, imperfect, normal families have the freedom to be honest and real with one another, to acknowledge mistakes and limits, and to love one another anyway. Perfect, airbrushed families aren’t free to give that kind of love. They have to work all the time to measure up, to have spotless countertops and
well-groomed children. What a witness to God’s goodness and mercy it can be when we love each other
because
we are limited and broken and human.

I fear that the images of family in Twilight may encourage us to think that we have to be glittering, immortal Cullens in order to know happiness and love. I worry about how easily Bella leaves her imperfect family behind. In doing so, she isolates herself from the way they care for her. Even if their care is imperfect, they love her and want good things for her. Bella cuts herself off from the love and accountability they offer. By trading them in for the Cullens, she loses the opportunity and challenge involved in loving real, messy, imperfect human beings.

God’s gift of family is a good gift. It’s not perfect though. We can be grateful that we don’t need a good and beautiful family to solve all our problems or to save us. Family will let us down. Christian hope, though, will not.

T
HINK
A
BOUT
I
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/T
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A
BOUT
I
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1. Do you have an image of the “perfect” family? Does your family try to put on a perfect face to the world?
   

2. Have you, like Bella, experienced the family as a disappointing place?
   

3. Are you tempted to “check out” of your family life when it disappoints and annoys?
   

4. Have you ever experienced God’s grace through weakness? Through opportunities that ordinary life provides to care for and love other weak people?
   

5. How can ordinary, weak people reflect God’s goodness to the world?
   

6. This chapter has argued that the family should not be idealized, that we should accept the weakness of our families, but this should
   never
   be understood as an excuse for abuse. If you or someone you know is affected by physical, sexual, or emotional abuse in your family, you need to get away from the abuse. Talk to someone—a pastor, a teacher, a friend—who can help. Visit
   www.stopfamilyviolence.org
   for resources for those experiencing family violence.
   

For Eternity

B
ELLA’S FEELINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE
are at odds with her wish to be with Edward forever. Why would a girl willing to become a vampire for her love balk at the prospect of marrying him? Though she is terrified of marriage, Bella eventually agrees to marry Edward and is ultimately happy in her choice. Her worries about marriage contrast with other views of marriage in the saga, in which marriage is shown as an ideal eternal commitment and the basis of a happy shared life for the couple. How do the different messages about marriage in Meyer’s story help us to think about marriage from a Christian perspective?

At the beginning of
Breaking Dawn
, Bella prepares to marry Edward. Once she is his wife, he will finally make her a vampire. Her agreement, though, has been given against her instincts. She panics at the thought of marriage and can’t reconcile the idea with her wildly romantic feelings for Edward. She explains to him, “I’m not that girl, Edward. The one who gets married right out of high school like some small-town hick who got knocked up by her boyfriend!”
¹
Bella associates marriage with reduced opportunities and disdains it as a traditional route that doesn’t make sense for her. Her mother married young and has trained her to think of early marriage as a certain mistake, a mistake she’s too smart to make. Despite Edward’s enthusiasm and her own desire to be with him forever, she can’t shake the negative feelings she has about marriage.

In contrast, Edward’s feelings about marriage are all positive. He tells Bella about the kind of human being he was before he became a vampire so many years ago. Edward explains, “If I had found you, there isn’t a doubt in my mind how I would have proceeded. I was that boy, who would have—as soon as I discovered that you were what I was looking for—gotten
down on one knee and endeavored to secure your hand. I would have wanted you for eternity, even when the word didn’t have quite the same connotations.”
²
Edward is clearly not afraid of commitment, and he seeks marriage because he wants to be bound to Bella.

Neither of Bella’s parents thinks the marriage is the best idea. She especially dreads telling her mother, whose past experience means that “early marriage was higher up on her blacklist than boiling live puppies.”
³
Bella argues that people will assume the only reason two teenagers would possibly get married is if she were pregnant. Edward offers an alternative reason though. In his mind, two people their age would obviously marry because of love.