I Gave Up “normal” for Lent

Fourteen weeks after the accident, I face the exact same struggle after coming home from a mission trip…returning to normal. It’s a fact once people experience God on the mission field, as well as walk through a traumatic event, they can never be the same again. We can never be normal because normal is never the same as it was before, it’s no longer good enough, or fulfilling enough. There’s more to life than just being normal. This morning as I was reading Numbers, which has got to be one of the most boring books in the Bible, I realized the children of Israel were far from normal. They were God’s chosen people and set apart, yet they constantly fought God to be like everyone else.

As always when the Holy Spirit begins to pour into my spirit truth, I tend to post some contentious things on Facebook & Twitter, which always results in losing friends and followers. Anyways, I want to restate a few post here:

• “Fighting normal with a vengeance! Don’t like the company he keeps: contentment, complacency & comfortable. Prefer peculiar & extraordinary!”
• “Normal & ordinary people are no threat to the kingdom of darkness. Peculiar people storm gates, raise the dead & turn the world upside down.”
• “The kingdom of darkness attempts to assassinate those who are a threat. If satan’s not coming after us, we’re not a threat.”

Although I am not Catholic, I decided to give up “normal” for lent this year. I choose to be peculiar and extraordinary, or better yet “strange, odd, unusual or remarkably great“. Like my mission trips, the accident has forever etched its impact into my physical, emotional and spiritual DNA. I am forever changed, yet I am most grateful for the God’s grace. He allows me me to live, so I can love; serve, so I fulfill; and fight, so I can turn the world upside down.

Normal people don’t live, they exist. Normal people don’t serve, they consume. Normal people don’t fight, they conform.