Misspent Youth?

In my flurry of reading about youth ministry, I've recently looked through Kenda Dean's book Practicing Passion.

One of her main points is that young people are inherently passionate...and the Church is missing the boat. Teenagers are looking for someone or something to die for. To invest their all in. To put their passion in. To go for broke with and never look back.

And what do we do? We make them play silly games. We hand out candy. We ignore the depths of passion they feel and think that a hayride will be "fun."

Sure, we spend some time in prayer and worship, but maybe that kind of thing should happen much more frequently. Going on a hayride may be a pleasant diversion...but in the end, that's all that it is--a diversion. At the end of the day, it has its place. But there is more. Holding a prayer meeting, teaching from the Scripture, talking about things that really matter...this is what I want to be doing.

And based on what Kenda is saying, it is what young people would rather do as well. At the very least it is, I think, better than wasting our time trying to be cool.

I mean, seriously. Is the Church of Jesus Christ really supposed to be cool? Is that what we are all about?

I like what Kenda is saying in her book. It makes sense. For despite the fact that I'm getting older and my own passion is not what it was, I still deeply desire to give my all for something and be consumed by it.

And I think young people see things as they are in many ways. Sure, their language may be overexaggerated at times...it is not always the end of the world.

But gosh does it feel like it.

Do you remember that feeling? Laying awake at night wondering why life was this way and how horrible it was, but waking up the next morning and jumping into it anyway? Putting yourself on the line for that guy or girl that was your imagined "soulmate?" Looking around for someone who understood you? For someone (as Kenda writes), to "be there" for you?

Things were fresher then. They were crisper. They felt better and they hurt more. But they were good, somehow.

Perhaps we that are older have just grown complacent and lazy and don't realize how much like the end of the world many things in our life really are. That maybe these things aren't just like the end of the world but are the end of a world in many ways.

Yet it seems the sharpness of life lived this way is often too much for our old bones.

Still...we need passion, too. We need to feel like it's the end of the world every now and then. We need to know what is at stake in life.

For we have begun to anaesthesize ourselves too much against life. We've turned from trying to fill that "God-shaped hole" to accepting it grudgingly. We've left the front line fighting to the young and the foolish while settling to live our lives in relative quietness.

And meanwhile we slowly wither, afraid to face the pain and the immediacy of it all like we did back in 10th grade.

Afraid, perhaps, of the truth.

It is a truth each of us needs and a truth that each young person looks for. And despite the fact that their own passion is often misspent and follows dangerous directions...at least it is passion.

Maybe at the next youth group meeting they can have something to teach us.

"Without passion, we'd be truly dead."
--From a certain teen television show--