A New Kind of Normal

I think I'm figuring out this new season of life. It's not normal. It’s abnormal.

A few months ago I realized that I’ve been trying to fit abnormal into normal since our return to the States. Maybe because we were back to our native country I thought things were going to fall into place like they had before.

There was a time in our lives when normal fit. Normal meaning ordinary, the usual, the expected. Life was regular and routine. For 30 out of 35 years of marriage Dennis and I had a reasonably structured life. When we served in local church ministry, our life generally revolved around the life of the church. Friday was a day off. Sunday was always a big day. Then we began the week all over again. 

I think this is true for most people. There's a pattern to life that keeps repeating itself week after week. You find a rhythm as it relates to your job, family, and the activities that you add into life. This becomes your normal. 

For the first 30 years of married life, we had four kids at home, eventually getting down to just one while the others were off to college or getting married. Highly organized or not, kids brought routine to life. It was as simple as packing lunches, helping with homework, and bedtime rituals. Routine came as life coordinated with school schedules, extracurricular activities, not to mention, church and community life.

Then seasons changed. Our youngest went off to college. God led us out of local church ministry. We moved to Europe where we served in missions for three years. The role called for frequent travels. Rather than thinking of life as week to week we worked life around trips, maintaining as much routine as we could in between travels.

In many ways Europe prepared us for the current season. It's been almost a year and a half since we moved back to the States as Dennis took on his new role with Global Partners, the mission arm of our denomination. We still travel a lot. Dennis made “1K” status on United, and I'll catch up to him on our next trip. That means we've traveled over 100,000K in the past year. We travel farther and longer now. Airports and planes are fast becoming a comfortable place. I settle into my window seat and I sigh a good sigh. Ah, a familiar place. I know what to expect. I can have my most creative moments at 35,000 feet. And, I’m always reminded of a Sovereign God who loves me and cares about the people who live below. A gift of the abnormal.

Where life once focused on a particular body of Christ, now we don’t even have a home church. We are rarely home on Sundays. On any given Sunday, we could be in another state, or somewhere in the world. Our lifestyle revolves around our travels, and that dictates where we might be worshipping. Another gift of the abnormal. It is a blessing to be able to serve and worship in a diversity of churches, seeing firsthand how God is moving in different parts of the world. I can feel at home wherever I am in the body of Christ. Maybe we come close to echoing John Wesley's journal entry: I look upon all the world as my parish, this far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am . . . Yes, whatever part of it I am in, that is my church home. 

Thanks to technology, we can skype, email, text our kids from anywhere in the world. It really is an amazing thing. A gift in this age, time, and season of our lives.

So, I’m learning what this abnormal looks like. It's a new kind of normal, and what a gift it is!