Touched by a Vampire (17 page)

1. Do you identify with Bella’s dissatisfaction with her ordinary life? With the slogan “Bella: Hope for clumsy girls everywhere”?
   

2. Spend a few minutes thinking about the truth that human beings are created in the image of God. List some ways this should change the way we think about our own lives and the lives of all humans.
   

3. Where have you witnessed God’s transforming power? God’s power to bring light out of darkness? goodness out of sin? life out of death?
   

4. What are the features of Bella’s transformation? Which ones might help us think better about Christian hope?
   

5. How does the Christian promise of transformation—the promise of the resurrection of the body—change the way you think about your life? your body? your purpose?
   

6. What would it look like, in day-to-day life, to “bear the likeness” of Jesus? What specific things about His life could be reflected in your own life?
   

Passion for God

D
ESIRE TAKES A CENTRAL ROLE
in the Twilight Saga. There is deep desire for blood. There’s Bella’s desire for Edward and his for her. Bella’s and Jacob’s conflicted desire for each other. Edward’s desire to marry Bella and Bella’s to become a vampire. Sexual desire is worked through the entire series. There are desires for family, for closeness, for love. Desire to protect baby Renesmee and other loved ones. Desire to be strong, to be good, to be immortal. Perhaps most powerful of all, the desire to be transformed.

Desire is strong stuff. What we want shapes who we are. It shapes our lives, our actions, our time, and our commitments. Because of desire we go down one road and reject another. We’re deeply shaped by our desires.

We are what we crave, and Christians have a compelling story to tell about how desire can be shaped by God.

Throughout this book, I’ve expressed concerns that the Twilight Saga encourages us to spend our desire on things other than God. Bella is constantly looking for fulfillment in all kinds of things. She focuses her hope on love with Edward, expecting to find happiness in an immortal vampire life shared with him. She’s a clear example of what it might look like to suppose that your life can be made complete by someone else. She calls Edward the “core” of her existence.
¹
Her desire for him is overwhelming, and she fully expects him to meet her needs and make her happy.

In various chapters of this book, I’ve suggested that it’s a warning sign when we start pouring all our desire into one place or one person. When we put someone on a pedestal, that person is bound to come tumbling down. For instance, some of us center our hopes on families, wanting parents or children to be perfect, to be more than they can or should be. When our hope is centered on another human being, we’re asking that person for something he or she can’t and shouldn’t give.

Dreams about love, romance, marriage, and even sex can take over our lives. Those dreams can control all our passions. We look to all kinds of things to transform us—exercise, food, education, love—but we’re inevitably disappointed when these things don’t deliver fulfillment.

At many points, Scripture describes the problem with human beings as a problem of desire. We want what we shouldn’t want, crave what can never fulfill us, and throw our energy into loving things that lead us away from God. Second Peter 2:10 speaks of the “corrupt desire of the sinful nature.”

Our whole beings are shaped by what we desire and love. Martin Luther taught “that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.”
²
Luther wrote this when teaching about God’s command to “have no other gods” (Exodus 20:3). He recognized that whenever our hearts cling to things besides God, we are making false gods out of those things. Luther saw that we’re likely to cling to and desire all kinds of things—money, learning, power, tradition, and other people. He begged Christians to see that the only place to put our trust and hope, the only thing worth clinging to, is God. Luther explains that it is as if God were speaking directly to us and saying, “Whatever good thing you lack, look to me for it and seek it from me, and whenever you suffer
misfortune and distress, come and cling to me. I am the one who will satisfy you and help you out of every need. Only let your heart cling to no one else.”
³

In Romans 8, the Christian life is described as a life in which desire is changed from the desires of sin to desires for the things of God: “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires” (verse 5). The sinful nature is all about wanting the wrong things. It’s about desiring things that aren’t God and about getting deluded into thinking that those things will make us happy. We can’t force ourselves to desire God instead of other things, but the Spirit helps us to see things as they are, to save us from loving the wrong things the wrong way, and to change our desires. When this happens, God begins to transform our whole lives.

In
chapter 6
, I talked about an ancient pastor named Augustine and his views on marriage as a good gift from God. Augustine was a good reader of Scripture and a good observer of the Christian life, and his take on being human has exercised
more influence over Christian thought than any other thinker down through the centuries—outside of Jesus and the biblical authors. Augustine believed desire was central to what it means to be human. He thought it was central to both what’s wrong with us
and
to the way that God takes what’s wrong and makes it right. His thoughts on the subject help us think about the ways our lives are controlled by the things we want and love.

As Augustine describes the situation, there are two ways to love something. We can love with a love of use, or we can love with a love of enjoyment. The love of enjoyment belongs only to the things that make us truly happy. That love of enjoyment—I suppose we could call it “true love”—happens when we love something for its own sake. The love of enjoyment means that we’re satisfied with the thing we love; we’re content with it as itself.

The love of use is a love that helps us get to that place of real happiness. The thing we love with a love of use is meant for a certain purpose—a use—and we love it because it does what it’s meant to do. I might love my station wagon with a love of use. It’s not particularly lovable in itself. Not many people get excited about a boring car like a station wagon for its own sake, but I love it because it does what it’s made to do by getting me from point A to point B.

Augustine had a giant revelation in his life. He spent lots of time spending his desire on things that weren’t God. He desired
women, knowledge, and power. After a long and painful process, he realized that it’s only God who makes us truly happy, and so he wanted to drive home the point that
only God
should be loved with that love of enjoyment. The only thing that is worthy of being loved for its own sake is God. Everything else will disappoint. Only God is truly lovable, which means we should love Him with true love, the love of enjoyment. Everything else—and Augustine really means it when he says
everything
—should be loved with a love of use.

Am I saying that we should love everything that isn’t God—all the big loves that drive the Twilight Saga, like romance and family, children and marriage—with the love Augustine calls a love of use? We’re supposed to
use
our loved ones? Augustine thinks we are. Before you close the book in disgust, hear him out.

Augustine thinks we should love
everything
that isn’t God with a love of use because only God is lovable in His own right. More importantly, we’re supposed to love everything that isn’t God with a love of use, but we can only do that properly when we understand what exactly it is that everything is useful
for
.

In Augustine’s way of thinking, everything has only one right use, only one proper purpose, and that is to love God.

He believes we’re supposed to love everything, absolutely everything, that isn’t God with the purpose of directing all of life toward loving and glorifying God. Love for God should be
like a rushing river; the water should pour in one mighty channel in God’s direction, and every other side stream or tributary ought to be collected into that one main river. Every drop of water, every bit of desire, the purpose of every love, ought to flow toward God.

When Augustine suggests that I should love God with a love of enjoyment and, say, my husband with a love of use, he isn’t saying I should use my husband in the way we usually think of when we say, “She’s using him.” I’m not supposed to use him to take out the trash or earn a paycheck. I’m not supposed to use him to build up my self-confidence or help me feel less alone. I’m supposed to “use” him for the one purpose he’s actually intended for. When God created my husband—and everything else—there was one reason. My husband is intended to exist for the love of God. So if I’m to love him with a love of use, my love for him should be
for God’s sake
. My love shouldn’t stop with him, as though he were the point of my life. Our love should point each other toward the purpose we’re both created for, loving and glorifying God, who
is
love. Our love, instead of stopping with us, should flow through us and on to God.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear Augustine’s diagnosis of our human situation. We get loving wrong. We love the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Only God will make us truly happy. Only God is truly lovable, but we love everything else as though it could fulfill us. We love husbands and wives, children and parents, jobs and hobbies, and even pizza and
cars as though they could make us truly happy. We love all these things for their own sakes. Then, to make matters worse, we love God, who truly
is
love, with a love of use. We love God because we think it might get us something—maybe loving God will get things to go our way. Or maybe we love God because we want a ticket to heaven. We love God to use Him and love everything else as though it will give meaning and purpose to our lives.

In Augustine’s diagnosis, we human beings are victims of a major love disorder. He compares us to “wanderers in a strange country” who will only be happy when we reach our true home. As wanderers, we need to use things in order to make that journey home. We need some way to get there—a boat, a car, a train, a pair of running shoes—if we ever hope to reach that place where real happiness lies. The problem is that we get sucked into the country we’re driving through, we get “engrossed” in false “delight,” and instead of hurrying home, we hang out in a country that can’t possibly make us happy.
⁴
We’ve gotten our loving, our desire, and our wanting all messed up. As sinners, we love everything but God as though it could fulfill us.

God can change our love, though. God can restore our desire so that we want what will make us truly happy, the thing we were intended for all along, a relationship with Him. It’s
God we’re meant to truly enjoy. Only God is eternal and trustworthy.

Desire is good thing. It’s meant to be directed to and for God.

In Psalms, we get a strong picture of what it looks like to desire God. “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God” (42:1). This is a great image, isn’t it? Picture the deer, incredibly thirsty from running through the woods, literally panting to get to that drink. We humans are that deer, longing for and panting for God. The psalm continues, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?” (verse 2).

In another psalm, the author cries out, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you” (73:25). In Psalm 145, we read a song of praise to God for fulfilling what we want and need. “You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing” (verse 16). Fulfillment is found in God. God satisfies our true desires.

God isn’t in the business of getting rid of our passion or dampening our desire. God is in the business of
transforming
our passion and desire so that, instead of longing for all kinds of stuff that disappoints, we can pour our love out on the one thing that will truly satisfy.