What I'm Reading: The Green Mile and Twilight

Who Wants To Live Forever?

“…years later, standing in the pouring Alabama rain and looking for a man who wasn’t there in the shadows of an underpass, standing amid the spilled luggage and the ruined dead, I learned a terrible thing: sometimes there is no difference at all between salvation and damnation.”

-Paul Edgecombe, The Green Mile

“Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars—points of light and reason…and then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire, everything was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone…my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.

I can’t live in a world where you don’t exist.”

-Edward Cullen, New Moon

(from the Twilight series)

Paul Edgecombe, head prison guard at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary, treads the green-tiled floor of Death Row your average guy. Just a Joe Prison Guard who accidentally peeks behind life’s curtain and sees a reality that, for him, had been the stuff of campfire stories. That reality alters him forever, and gives him a chance to change the world. At least, his humble corner of it.

What you need to know about Paul to understand why he’s lamenting his “salvation” is that some supernatural power from behind that curtain healed him of a disease while he was still on the rich side of the train tracks of middle age. What’s more, the residual effects of the healing kept him incredibly, impossibly young. Paul was blessed with a miraculously long life, the gift that kept on giving.

In fact, it gave until it hurt.

Now, I’m in my thirties, old enough to wish that Life would put on the brakes, a member of the “where does the time go?!” support group. The thought of being healed from disease, protected from sickness and enjoying unnaturally long life seems at first like a dream. It’s only years down the road that those extra years lose their luster.

For vampires, Everlasting Life is one of the curses, not the blessings, of undeath. Just ask the Cullens, the loveable family of bloodsuckers from the Twilight series. Edward, two-hundred-year old teen heartthrob, has been around the block a few thousand times. Frankly, he’s bored. What do vampires with hundreds of years to kill (sorry) do, exactly? Apparently they play baseball, learn the piano, and repeat high school every ten years or so. Not the dream life we’ve all imagined. Vampire or not, high school sucks (again, sorry).

Edward’s SO over it; life for him had become unbearably mundane. And for Paul Edgecombe, it turned damnably cruel. 

Years after his healing, Paul looked on helplessly as the love of his life died in a fatal bus accident while he “miraculously” survived. “Miracle” gets the quotes because a miracle that tears your true love away from you and leaves you to shuffle through endless years of hollow longing is a blessing with a drawback, a miracle with fangs. 

When life stretches on ad nauseum (how could it not, after aeons) and all you have left are haunting memories of the people you loved and are gone, eternity ceases to be a blessing and becomes a curse. That picture of life’s never one we’d wish for, but I’m pretty sure that’s how most of us view imagine heaven and eternity. 

If we examined our own views on living forever, I’d think we’d find that our hearts deem it the mixed blessing that Paul knows it, even before we’ve been down his road. From the cheap seats of the living, heaven seems vague and dull, like a cloudy day. As time “draws out like a blade” and the monotony sets in, who’s going to rescue us from heaven? Won’t we eventually want to call it quits?

That’s what Edward attempts in New Moon. He comes within a sunbeam (literally) of committing suicide because he believed that the one exciting part of his life, the human he loved (Bella), was dead. Unlike Paul, he’s wrong, and in the nick of time he understands. In fact, in New Moon he comes to the understanding that without Bella, life’s not worth it. Lucky for him, Bella becomes a vampire herself, and they get to enjoy pseudo-immortality together. 

Living forever with the one your soul loves—that’s an eternity we can wrap our minds around, right?  For Edward (and Bella too) it was the only thing that made life—and the eternal ramifications of it—bearable. 

If we could live forever with our True Love, wouldn’t that be an eternity we could get excited about?

That’s the heaven you find in the Bible! It’s one that we don’t usually grasp, a vision that doesn’t turn our gaze, because we don’t realize that our One True Love is God. God created you uniquely and passionately desires to spend all of eternity with you, enjoying a relationship with you, because He loves you! 

Granted, this idea can be easy to miss, because we don’t see God all around. We don’t hear a shout from across a room, to find God running toward us with a smile on His face. He rarely appears in the clouds, despite what the Weekly World News wants you to believe.

The extent of God’s love, and therefore the greatness of heaven, is pretty hard to see--Unless you know where to look.

There are two places you can find God’s love for you, if you’re willing to take a look. The first is a hill outside of Jerusalem, Israel, about two thousand years ago. That’s where a man claimed that God loved everyone in the world. Loved them so much, in fact, that he sent His son to die so that they might have a relationship with him—a relationship that would be more incredible than anything they’d ever possibly experienced, and would last forever. He is that son, and he did die. Painfully. To pay for your sin with his life, so that you could fall in love with the most perfectly beautiful person in the entire universe. That was Jesus’ goal. 

The second place stands right near the first, a tomb in a garden. That’s where they put Jesus when He died. If you look today though, if you can find it again, it stands empty. The man who died for you is alive again, and is waiting for you—the one he loves—to begin an eternal adventure that only gets better.

Paul Edgecombe lost the love of his life, and it turned the miracle of unending life into a macabre joke. For Edward Cullen, his wife joining him as eternal (ish) was the only thing stopping him from ending his existence.

There’s a love that’s waiting for you, too--a love that makes today worth living, that changes life into something greater and more glorious than any other relationship could. And it’s that same love that’s going to make Eternal Life sweet, each and every day (or whatever we’ll call it). Don’t miss out on the love of your life. Jesus Christ is the only One that makes life worth living. Forever.

You can start that relationship today. Check out how, here.