What is normal?
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of "normal". For the past week I have actually been at home in Milford, IA (a little unexpected, but an appreciated break from "the norm" - ironically enough, this unexpected change has become "the norm"). It was on the 12 hour car ride home from Tennessee that Jesse and I kinda hashed over the concept of Normalization and how it affects our perceptions and attitutes about an experience, situtation and/or person.
I will try to explain this Normalization concept, but it's a little difficult because it is something that I am trying to figure out myself. After 10 monthes on the road, things that were once very "not normal" are now the daily grind. Places that I only once dreamed of have come and gone. Conversing with individuals whom I once considered quite different than myself based on social, physical, cultural and spiritual differences has become and everyday occurance and an humbling opportunity to realize that we are all human beings trying to find purpose in our lives. It has become normal to find ourselves welcomed into the home of a family we have only just met at their doorstep. It is normal to drive 12 hours on any given day. It is normal to sleep on a church basement floor. It has become normal to have almost nothing in our lives that is normal.
I hope that this give a bit of an illustration. I have also experienced that this normalization phenomenon is also accompanied by a downward spiral off the mountain top. This mountain top experience is the adrenaline/spiritual high that is encountered when the individual finds oneself in a new, strange world that pushes oneself out of his/her comfort zone. I must admit that it is a bit frustrating to encounter a situtation that once would have evoked this mountain top high but now has (for a lack of a better word) become normal.
What do you do when constant change, unstablity and different weekly community becomes the norm?
Thanks to all for entertaining this random thought...
stephanie
2 Comments:
Steph, isn't it interesting that what for you is normal is for many of us abnormal and what is now unusual is for most of us normal? The joy is in finding God in the normal and the abnormal... infiltrating on the normal of others and seeing God there, escaping your reality and finding God there as well. Can you imagine... there are people in their "normal" world who long to give of themselves as Latreia has given. I think normal is whatever God calls us to do.. and whereever God happens to be in the process (God is in all those places; normal and not normal). Thanks Steph, for all you do.. and your perspectives. DAD BILL
Steph,
Yes, I understand what you mean by your experiencing a 'normalization' process. As Kelly was getting ready to return to the Latreia journey after our family vacation, I asked her if she was "ready to go back home". It wasn't meant to be a humorous comment--I was serious! We both laughed and talked about the context of the question. But now I realize that not only is Latreia's method of Christian outreach normal to you, but it's also become normal to me. And now that I think of it, that in itself is a very, very good thing...
As for the downward spiral off the mountain top, it brings to mind Peter and the transfiguration of Christ. Peter wanted to stay and preserve the experience, but Jesus knew better. Without the descent down the mountain, there could be no shared stories, no outreach, no additional lives changed by the experience Peter had just witnessed.
Can you imagine the "extreme normalization" that must have occurred for the disciples as they spent three years in the company of God incarnate? Wow. Maybe normal isn't always so bad...
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