I always know when the music swells and the snow starts falling the movie is over, and the couple, entwined in each other’s arms will live happily ever after. However, for the two hours (or hour and a half depending on commercials) before this special moment the couple have waged a battle of the sexes or have montage-d through a breathy song or two to fall in love. They look deeply into each other’s eyes and suddenly realize that life is unbearable if the other is not around. They seem to know this because we need another montage and breathy song to tell us they are moping about, depressed and in despair. This kind of love story I understand. At least the viewer (me) is given perfectly good reasons why the couple fall in love with each other.
Other kinds of stories leave me clueless why anyone should love that person or the other person. The couple is all caught up in some adventure with bad guys shooting and they are shooting back (sometimes she knows how to shoot a gun, and other times she squeezes her eyes shut and pulls the trigger). They probably fall in love when the girl twists her ankle and the guy has to carry her over 50 miles of desert. That is after their car flips end over end and, of course they have their seat belts on so neither one gets more than a scratch. Yet, her ankle or foot is useless, even though it never swells up or turns blue, so he has to carry her. Then in about 15 minutes the thing is perfectly healed.
That reminds me that bruises, cuts, scrapes and vast amounts of blood loss are miraculously healed in the matter of a few moments, but a broken pair of glasses must be mended with a white piece of tape for the entire movie.
In these types of movies, people actually do go into shock at traumatic events like car wrecks and erupting volcanoes, but only those that are known by just their last name or first name in the movie, or who have no name in the credits such as ‘man on highway’ or ‘waitress no. 2’ die.
Time really has no meaning in movies. It only takes 30 seconds to teach someone how to dance good enough to win an award – unless the movie is about dancing and then it only takes an hour.
Regardless of reasons, however, a couple just looks at each other and are madly in love, so much so that they do stupid things to prove their love. This is something that has been perpetuated down through the decades in the movies, and I’m thinking the main culprit is William Shakespeare who penned Romeo and Juliet. Those two kids looked and loved, or what they thought was love, which was actually infatuation and lust.
Too often humans misdiagnose infatuation for true love.
An example of this phenomenon is when David’s son Amnon looked and lusted at his half-sister Tamar, so much so that it made him sick. He deceived his father and her to lure her into his bedchamber where he raped her. Then he hated her as much as he had loved her. That story wouldn’t make it to the movies because it didn’t end well at all. Tamar never married. Absalom murdered Amnon. David’s house was in turmoil because he did not take a strong hand in disciplining his sons.
Is there any truth to love at first sight? It is exactly like marrying a person for his physical body or that chemical reaction attraction ... Just like perfume, it wears off. Eventually a person gets exhausted of nothing but pleasure and it then comes to a point where there is no more satisfaction in the pleasure act and cravings begin to develop for something more than just pleasure. That first taste of an intoxicating drug that causes flames of pleasure coursing through the bloodstream dies out and it takes larger doses for the same effect. Paul wrote that in the last days people would become addicted to lust and allergic to God (2 Timothy 3:4), and Peter wrote false teachers would live by lust and be addicted to a filthy existence. (2 Peter 2:10).
We are saturated with the adages, “You can’t help who you love,” and “Love blossoms in strange places,” but I rarely hear the truth about love. Satan has built a huge cult about infatuation and lust calling it true love, yet he has no notion what true love is so how can he define it? Why do we listen to his lies about it?
Simply because he tells us what we want to hear, and we rarely look past that searching for truth because the truth is, love is a lot of work. Paul does an excellent job of analyzing love in 1 Corinthians 13.
Love translates different languages and jumbled emotions into understanding. Speaking in tongues of men or angels is simply clanging cymbals if one is not speaking through love. Therefore, love is a filter which strains out the uglies.
The burning question is how can true love happen at first sight?
Thank you LORD for loving us humans at first sight!
Gina Burgess has taught Sunday School and Discipleship Training for almost three decades. (Don't tell her that makes her old.) She earned her Master's in Communication in 2013.
She is the author of several books including: When Christians Hurt Christians, The Crowns of the Believers and others available in online bookstores. She authors several columns, using her God-given talent to shine a light in a dark world. You can browse her blog at Refreshment In Refuge.
If you'd like to take a look at some Christian fiction and Christian non-fiction book reviews check out Gina's book reviews at Upon