Posts Tagged: What is normal?

“The Lust to Get Back to Normal”

On October 27, 2020 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“To be human is to exist, not in stasis or equilibrium: only fossils do that.”[1]

“‘Normal’ is just the name of a town in Illinois.”  (Source unknown)

We all want—or even long—to get back to normal.  Yes, I do too.  However, let me ask you, as well as myself, several questions.

  • What is normal?
  • Why do we want to go back to it?
  • Is our normal “normal” (or perhaps better, our usual normal) a private reality/construct, or a societal reality/construct?  If reality is a societal or relational reality, which society or relationships are we talking about?
  • If we are Christians, is normal even a possibility for us?  As believers, we are called to be counter-cultural.  Have we forgotten this?

Cornelius Plantinga wrote a book titled Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin.[2]  I’ve only dipped into the book, but I love the title.  Those of us who try to take the Bible seriously recognize that our world has not been “normal” since Genesis 3:6.

And one more question: Was our normal, whether it was individual, familial, or societal, really ever all that normal?  I suspect that, for many of us, good memories are primarily a result of bad memory.

As a believer, indeed as a human, it seems to me that there is something better than “getting back to normal.”  It is making the day, this day, better.  And we can do that, no matter how abnormal our days are or seem to be.  Making this day better appears to me to be infinitely better than lusting after a normal which probably was pretty messed up anyway.

[1] Anthony J. Griffiths, Courage and Conviction: Unpretentious Christianity (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2018), 180.

[2] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

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