Confessions of a Christian Twi-Hard: My Life Lessons and the Twilight Saga

By Sharon K. Wells and Cindy Biondi Gobrecht

What can the fantasy of the Twilight Saga teach us about reality?

Cindy Biondi Gobrecht says, I never liked vampire stories, and here I am a self-proclaimed Twi-hard! The stories are about more than vampires. The saga is about love, devotion, sacrifice, heartache, courage, and faith, to name a few. These are things I can relate to in my own life and my Christian faith. The characters in Twilight are heroic in relation to these qualities. I aspire to be heroic through my faith in Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449761042

Sharon K. Wells

Cindy Biondi Gobrecht has been involved with church ministry for over thirty years. She has led and developed Bible studies for men and women ages fourteen to eighty at churches in California as well as South Carolina. Ms. Gobrecht has a BA in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, with minors in literature and anthropology. She also completed Bible survey courses from Biola College. Her studies have given her the tools to observe and understand society and communicate those observations effectively. In reading the Twilight Saga books, Ms. Gobrecht developed a desire to explain their popularity through her understanding of our current society, life experiences, the Bible, and Christian faith. In doing so, her hope is to make principles of the Christian faith relevant to current society. Ms. Gobrecht resides in central California. She is an independent sales director for a major cosmetics company. Ms. Gobrecht is single with an adult daughter who serves in the US Marines. She enjoys travel, especially for mission service.

Book preview

Table of Contents

This World Is Not My Home…

1

I Would Do Anything For Love

2

Love Is A Battlefield

3

Everything I Do (I Do It For You)

4

I Have Nothing…If I Don’t Have You

5

It’s A Heartache

6

Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word...

7

The Battle Belongs To The Lord

8

I Can Only Imagine...

9

We Were Made To Be Courageous…

10

Even When I Don’t See… I Still Believe

11

Help For Today And Bright Hope For Tomorrow

Epilogue

Resources

Chapter Title Songs

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it… you and you alone make me feel that I am alive… Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

George Moore

Prologue

I don’t like vampire stories. I had a friend who was really into the whole Anne Rice Series. She had to read them as fast as they were published. I didn’t think it was a good genre for a Christian girl. I thought she needed some kind of spiritual intervention. Not that I totally avoided them. When I was a teenager, my friends and I loved watching the daytime drama Dark Shadows. We were heartbroken when it was cancelled.

I am a movie junkie so I have seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula more than a few times, mostly because of Keanu Reeves. I have also seen the movie Interview with the Vampire from one of the Anne Rice books because of Brad Pitt. I’ve even seen Anne Rice’s home once on a tour of New Orleans. I was not too enthralled with any of it. I’m not into anything that I feel glorifies the Enemy, as in Satan, the Devil, the Serpent, the Great Dragon, the Prince of this World, etc. I had had enough run-ins with the enemy in my life; I didn’t want to seek out any more. That’s what I thought of the whole Vampire Genre—too much glorifying the Enemy.

I was aware of all the hype around the Twilight Saga. It seemed the vampire genre for the new millennium. I saw the interviews and some trailers for the movies as they came out. The stars were all young and gorgeous so I could see the appeal, similar to my Reeves-Pitt attraction to the older vampire movies. That was the limit of my interest.

Then one weekend in January 2011 we got free Showtime on TV, which is, apparently, the official Twilight Channel. It was free and I was curious. I watched Twilight and that was it; I was hooked.

I had to watch all three movies that had come out. Then I had to read Breaking Dawn and the prequels to get all the details left out of the movies. Finally, I was compelled to buy all the movies and watch them several times. Yikes!!! There was no denying it: this 50-something, divorced mother of a 22 year-old daughter was a Twi-hard!

Ok, so Edward is not a real vampire in that he doesn’t commit murder by drinking human blood, but there is part of each story dedicated to murderous human-blood drinking vampires. There are conflicts between good versus evil vampires. I guess that was part of the fascination for me. I related their battles to my spiritual journey in which I am battling true good and evil in the real world.

There is the love story between Bella and Edward. Edward is the ultimate bad boy because he thirsts for Bella’s blood. But it is more than that. The love story is about devotion, sacrifice, loss, pain, hurt, betrayal, temptation, and redemption—things I have also experienced.

There was more to the story that drew me in and held me. The more I read, the more I found Truth amidst the fantasy. The Truth is about a spiritual reality that exists for those of us who embrace Jesus as Lord, and believe the truths of the Bible. The things that captivated me in the stories did so because I know that through Christ I could experience them in my life and will experience them in the immortal life ahead for me in heaven. There are things in my life that allowed me to experience emotionally what the characters in the saga experienced.

I felt a desire to share my perspective and, in sharing my journey and the exciting life that awaits those that embrace the true Supernatural in Christ, I hope others find it too.

This World Is

Not My Home…

1

I can relate to Bella. She is clumsy and doesn’t feel like she fits into this world, as she reveals:

Facing my pallid reflection in the mirror, I was forced to admit that I was lying to myself. It wasn’t just physically that I’d never fit in. And if I couldn’t find a niche in a school with three thousand people, what were my chances here? (Meyer-Twilight).

I’ve always felt out of step. Like literally stumbling through my life. I’ve never felt normal, because I’m not normal, and I don’t wanna be. I’ve had to face death and loss and pain in your world, but I’ve also never felt stronger, like more real, more myself, because it’s my world too. It’s where I belong (Rosenberg-Eclipse).

Bella is longing for a world she does not fit into. I