“When will things get back to normal?”
I’ve asked that question. Have you?
I will fully concede my bias here: no one has ever accused me of being normal—but I’m convinced that normal is an illusion.
I searched my Bible for the word “normal.”
It only shows up once in the ESV—in Exodus 14:27. In that passage, it isn’t describing a person. It describes how the Red Sea “returned to its normal course” after God’s miraculous division.
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary says that normal describes something “conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.”
Even as kids, we feel a strong pressure to conform to the standard. We don’t want to stand out. We want to go with the flow and blend in with the crowd.
What’s the result of our lifelong obsession with normal?
We compete with the Jones’s.
We measure our success by our outside perception of others’ inside lives.
Maybe if we framed it differently, we’d realize the insanity of it all.
Most people in the modern world are unhappy, unhealthy, up to their eyeballs in debt, and crazy busy. And we spend most of our lives trying to be just like them!
The true path to happiness is more likely to lead through abnormal lands than normal ones. After all, didn’t Jesus say something about a broad path that leads to destruction, and a narrow one that leads to life?
Normal is just a setting on a washer.
What if we aimed for extraordinary instead?