I’m writing this before I leave for Kenya, but if the Lord wills it and everything has gone well. I should be back in the United States when this newsletter goes out.
That will mean a lot of things, but probably one of those is that things will be returning “back to normal” in many ways. I’m planning on being present (if a little jet lagged) at worship on Sunday and getting back to my regular hours at the church office this coming week. Of course, there are going to be things that are different. I will have a new perspective after my trip. I will be tired. There will be things that came up while I was gone.
I remember joking with someone recently about having a “normal” week because the “normal” weeks seemed to come less often than the “abnormal” weeks. The only thing that made the “normal” weeks normal was the absence of something that would throw off the planned rhythms, but there is so often something that throws us out of our rhythms.
So often sin is the thing that throws us off our rhythms. Sin throws a wrench in things, complicates things, makes things more difficult to deal with. Maybe it is your own sin, maybe it is the sin of another, maybe your sin is throwing off someone else. Whatever it is, because we live in a sinful world, we live in a world that is not as easily planned for as perhaps it should be.
That isn’t to say that change or spontaneity is bad, we certainly have a God who loves both of those things, but we also have a God who promises us peace. That is what His forgiveness does for us. It brings us back to “normal”. The “normal” of being loved by Him, the “normal” of being cleansed of sin, the “normal” of righteousness in His Name. And while those things may actually feel “abnormal” to us today, He promises us an eternity in which His love and peace will be absolutely normal to us. I’m looking forward to getting to that kind of normal.