An Idol called NORMAL

For most of my life I have wanted only one thing, to be normal. That was all. Just to be Normal. It didn’t seem to me too much to ask. I wanted desperately to fit in, to blend in to be invisible. To simply be normal.

I was different. I was an only child. I was a gifted only child. I had a rapport with adults that other children my age didn’t. I genuinely wanted to please my parents, my teachers my mentors. I was reading fluently when I began first grade. I had to arrive at school an hour early for special instruction and my classmates resented the “help” I was assigned to give the. Even at that very early age, I was not NORMAL. And I wanted to be. I wanted that more than anything in the whole world.

I have, to this very day, strove to be normal. It was my goal. My desire. My obsession. My idol. Yes, my idol. Today I have been convicted that my idol is this illusive thing called “normal”.

I wasn’t called to be normal. And God isn’t willing to let me settle for normal either. Normal is being conformed to this world…and God has called me to be transformed by the renewing of my mind. Normal is Peter denying Christ with curses as the rooster crowed. Normal is an idol and today it fell.

God showed me what I was asking him for when I kept begging to be normal. He showed me that normal was my Tarshish when I was called to go to Ninevah. For those of you that don’t get the reference…think three days in a whale belly. Only I’ve spent THIRTY YEARS here. God called me to himself. He anointed me to proclaim freedom to the captives. He didn’t commission me to be normal. He commissioned me to lead. And that frightens me. The scripture that He gave me as my “marching orders” is the same scripture that almost got Christ stoned for blasphemy when he claimed it as his commission. I have a call on my life, a charge to keep and what was holding me back from it was the siren song of “normal.”

Truly, none of us were created to be “normal” we are told again and again that we are called according to God’s purpose. From the moment of our conception, when God knit us together in our mother’s womb, he had a plan for our lives. The trick is finding it. At least now I’m back on the path…not off chasing a rabbit trail called “normal”