Zealous stupidity

Tonight is the first Middle Madness for Light Force: Summer Style. What that means is that starting at 7 PM, I’ll be running around and playing crazy games with middle schoolers.

We started Middle Madness a year ago to try to help a glob of incoming 7th graders get acclimated to Light Force.
I liked it so much that I decided that we would do the same thing with this year’s glob of incoming 7th graders.

Now, I’m not a middle school expert like Jason Raitz, Mark Ostreicher, or the rest of the virtually insane people whose lives are "Middle school-centric."

What I like about middle schoolers is something I’ll call "zealous stupidity." I mean that as a compliment actually! Call an adult that and they get all huffy. But call a middle schooler that and they get it. They are like something launched out of a rocket. Going a million miles per hour and don’t care what gets in their way, laughing all the time. They have passion for things that makes no sense and they have energy for things that makes no sense. (Which is why some 9th graders are convinced that they are superheros and can handle playing 2-3 sports simultaneously.) They’ve not been refined to the way adults try to do things reasonably. And the laziness of high school has not set in. Middle schoolers are 1000% passion.

In that regard, middle schoolers are just like God. God goes after people with zealous stupidity… a love that makes no sense. A love that goes all the way to the darkest corners of our lives and brings light and hope and a smile when someone realizes that there is no use, no resisting, no reason… just giving themselves over to him because they’ve been overcome with His zealous stupidity for lost people.

A couple weeks ago, a person got upset with my use of the word "stupid." He felt like since I was calling students to a "stupid faith in Christ" that I was calling them to a life of unintelligence. He was particularly annoyed that I told the group that God would take 90% passion and 10% brains over 90% brains and 10% passion. He said, "Christians ought to be intelligent. There are Christians with brains."

I seem to remember Jesus encountering a bunch of religious people with 90% brains and 10% passion a few times. It’s pretty clear from his choice of disciples that he’ll take passion over brains 25 times in a row.

This is why I love middle schoolers. Passion, passion, passion.