Eclipse. Twilight. Magic. Fantasy. DANGER.

Hello, dear friends. I realize that it has been a long time since I've written on this blog, and I've just been posting videos and the like lately. So sorry! But, I'm sorry to say, this post will not be too much different. I want to post a link to a post at another blog of a very godly young lady, named Jasmine Baucham (no, I do not know her personally). Anyway, this is an article written by her on her blog about-- what else?-- the new fantasy teenage craze over movies and books known as the Twilight Series. Now, I don't think that I have ever expressed my opinion about such books on this blog. Horrors!! I'm not going to do this right here, right now, because I will end up rambling. But I'm going to do a post about *my* opinion on such things in the very near future. Yes. Quite. As for Miss Baucham, she deals with both the fantasy and the romantic side in Twilight-- and the dangers of both. She deals kindly, gently, and purely with the dangers in how the 'heroine' (Belle, I think her name is? I surprise myself sometimes.) Anyway, Belle's 'fickleness' of character and her 'love' for both men at the end. I'm sorry, but um, that's not LOVE. That's SELFISHNESS. Anyway-- I'll stop my rambling and let you read this. Please take the time, whether or not you've seen/ read the Twilight books or movies. I think you'll be blessed.

Eclipse. The Perfect Romance?
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Is It Love or a Corset?

There is a book that I read about a year ago called, A Proper Pursuit. It's basically about a shallow but naive twenty-year-old girl whose mother ran away when she was a child and whose father is about to be remarried. She decides to go stay with her grandmother and three great aunts for a while to search for her mother-- the catch? They each have their own idea of what they want Violet to do with her life. Her grandmother just wants her to marry a pastor. One great aunt just wants her to marry well (read: someone rich). Another great aunt just doesn't want her to marry AT ALL. And the last great aunt-- well, she just encourages Violet to marry someone she loves. By the end of the story, Violet has completely changed and becomes a Christian.

Now, Violet is quite the humorous young lady. The only knowledge she has of the world at large comes from reading romance and mystery and adventure novels. *Ahem* dime novels. Below is a section of her thoughts during a lecture that one of her great aunts took her to. I hope you find it as amusing as I did. By the way, this story is set at the end of the 19th century and is written in the first person.

"'Ladies,' she began, 'I'm well aware that the majority of you are, at this very moment, trapped in the confines of a whalebone corset. But you might be shocked to learn that, according to my research, your tightly laced corsets are responsible for more than fifty female ailments.' She proceeded to enumerate them, one by one, but my mind began to wander after 'heart palpitations, difficulty breathing, and lightheadedness.' The symptoms sounded suspiciously like a romance novel's description of love. Could it be that thousands of women had married their husbands in the mistaken belief that they were in love, when all along their corsets had been too tight? How disappointing to watch their love mysteriously vanish once their corsets were unlaced. I made up my mind that if I ever felt love's symptoms, I would loosen my corset immediately before accepting a proposal of marriage."

A Revival

For Easter I received a book called Though Waters Roar. All in all it was interesting, but far too sad for my taste. Anyway, that's not the point of this post. In fact, I only bring this up because the last few pages of the book are more than worth reading. Basically, this book is about a girl during prohibition helping her poor friend who was tricked into transporting alcohol from Canada to a saloon in the States. However, the friends have two young children and they cannot risk getting thrown in jail because the husband will never get a job and they are broke already. Long story short, that's where the heroine-- Harriet-- comes in. Harriet volunteers to deliver the alcohol herself under the condition that they agree to never, EVER, do anything like that again. Gratefully, her friends accept her offer, but in an unfortunate turn of events, Harriet is caught with the alcohol on her way to the saloon and thrown in jail. After she proves that she is not in to make money for herself by helping the police capture the still, she is freed and she goes to her grandma to tell her about what has happened. The problem? Her grandmother has fought for prohibition and against alcohol almost her entire life because her husband was an alcoholic.


All right, sorry that took so long. Now we have finally arrived to the part that really matters. At almost the end of the book, Harriet's grandmother tells her, "Jesus' harshest words were for the moral guardians of His day-- the Pharisees. They wanted to dictate morality, too, but Jesus called them hypocrites and whitewashed tombs. It isn't our calling as Christians to write laws that force people to live moral lives. As much as our communities might need it, and as bad as things are, imposing our morality on others isn't the answer. It doesn't work. People may be forced to give up alcohol, but they are still going to hell. That's our calling-- to bring people to Christ-- not to force them to behave the way we want them to or to solve all their external problems." She goes on to tell Harriet about different laws in the past that couldn't make people's hearts change. The Emancipation Proclamation set the slaves free, but it couldn't make people treat the former slaves as their equals. Prohibition could make drinking illegal, but if people's hearts were evil then it wouldn't really make a difference. They would still be wicked.

Now, please don't get me wrong, I do not say this or repeat this because I believe we should never have laws. God has laws, and I believe that our country should hold laws that uphold the laws that God gave. I believe this sincerely. What I am saying, however, is that laws do not change people's hearts. If one made all the laws in the world, it would not change the hearts of the people whose responsibility it was to uphold these laws. Only God can change hearts, and we must be willing to share the incredible news of the gospel with others, through evangelism and discipleship. Do you think that it's possible that sometimes Satan might distract us by getting us so involved in other causes, whether noble or not, that distract us from our ultimate goal-- to tell people about Christ and become like Christ?

I used to pray sometimes that God would change some laws in America. That He would change American's standards-- because it's always nice to live in a more moral society, right? But you know what I'm praying for now?

A revival.