Embrace Your Geekness

Tomorrow is “Embrace Your Geekness Day”!! (Who comes up with these?!) You may not know this, although I haven’t made any attempts to hide it, but there are plenty of things I could “geek out” about! I started to write about them all, and it got a little ridiculous. There was a particularly long paragraph about The Lord of the Rings.

What is “geekness,” though? I think it’s when you can’t contain excitement over a particular (often cerebral) interest, making you look uncool. People who say they don’t have any of these moments or interests are lying to you, and stifling them is so not the best way to live. In “embracing our geekness,” can we just say that we’re going to allow ourselves to thoroughly enjoy what we love, even if other people don’t?

I marvel at our capacity to enjoy things. Our ultimate enjoyment is only found in God, but he also created everything on Earth for us to enjoy. (It says so right here: 1 Timothy 6:17)

There are two quotes from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters regarding this topic that I love. Remember, that these “letters” are the communication between two demons trying to keep the “patient” (human soul) away from the “Enemy” (God.)

“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours.”

And then…

“The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting point, with which the Enemy has furnished Him… I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.”

If you get excited going to a planetarium or museum, get excited. If you have fun watching sci-fi tv shows, have fun. If you enjoy playing strategy board games with your family, do it. Harmless interests and hobbies like these, in their proper place, make us who we are, which is apparently what God had in mind all along.

–SONG