I know what you’re thinking. “Normal? What’s wonderful about normal? There’s nothing miraculous about being NORMAL.” And going by the definition of the word, you’re right. Normal, as we know it, means ordinary, expected. Movies and novels don’t usually revolve around the main characters rising from obscurity to become normal. In fact, most epic journeys begin with the desire to leave normalcy behind. Fairy tales end with happily ever after, not normally ever after. As a culture, we seek out extraordinary, amazing, sensational, exceptional, above and beyond even when it’s above and beyond our means or abilities. Go big or go home, they say. Stand out. A cut above. Be a big fish, capture the dream, shoot for the stars. Motivational posters don’t exist to encourage being normal, and we sure as heck don’t share about what’s normal on social media. Normal, as we know it, is overlooked, even sometimes embarrassing. No one wants to be normal – they all want to be anything but. In our quest for glory we ignore the very marvel that is NORMAL. We think that being normal means being less than, slower than, uglier than, poorer than.
My first pregnancy was not great. I mean, pregnancy itself is a generally hard experience, but my first was pretty bad. High blood pressure, bed rest, fetal monitoring multiple times a week, an IUGR diagnosis and a premature delivery via emergency C-section. We almost lost our baby and then had to leave him in the NICU for weeks. The circumstances surrounding him being born alive and healthy were nothing short of miraculous, and God really got to prove Himself. But as I found myself pregnant for the second time, I prayed differently. Though I knew God to be a God of miracles, of wonder, capable of anything and always holding me in His hand, I prayed for normal. I prayed for a normal pregnancy, a normal delivery, a normal baby. And when my uneventful pregnancy came to an end with an uneventful delivery and a normal baby with nothing extraordinary to share or anything standing out as apart from the norm, I praised God. Because God is as much in the normal as He is in the miraculous. Because sometimes, normal IS miraculous.
When the test results come back normal.
When the child develops normally.
When the baby is delivered normally.
When recovery goes normally.
When a day goes normally.
When a relationship progresses normally.
When you can eat a normal meal.
When you live in a normal house, in a normal city, surrounded by normal people.
Just ask a bride on her wedding day what a blessing it is for everything to go normally.
Because there are so many other ways it could go that aren’t “normal”. Because normal really means OKAY. It means that what’s expected is what’s in front of you. It means your head is above water and you’re making it. The relief that we experience when we share a struggle and are told it’s normal is marked. I remember very clearly a post I read on Facebook long ago. I was scrolling through, no doubt seeking an escape from the frustrations of being a mom, when I saw a post from a friend, a fellow mom: “What do the parents of normally-developing kids have to complain about?” At first it offended me a little, I’ll be honest. Because someone else’s struggle doesn’t negate my own, because it’s still hard to be a mom no matter what. But then I thought about it, and felt so ashamed and humbled by how right she was. What was I complaining about, really, while she awaited a diagnosis, an answer, any help she could find for her son who was not developing as expected, who wasn’t reaching milestones at the same time as his peers? What was really so bad about my kids being normal, high-energy, needy, rowdy, messy, hungry kids? Nothing. They were miraculously normal, they were okay. I wasn’t watching and hoping and praying for normal, because I’d failed to see how incredible normal actually is.
MANY years ago a guest speaker came to the church my husband and I were on staff at. He spoke of bold faith and big moves, and how God had blessed him in return for each of them. Passion like his is always a bit hard for me, the person who stinks at faith most times, the control freak who likes to have a hoard of canned goods and conditioner just in case. My husband came to me during the altar call of the service and told me he felt like God was prompting him to give $500 to this man’s ministry. My breath caught and my shoulders tensed. We had just, for the very first time, received a tax return (having a kid paid off!), and now had about $512 in the bank. This was new for my little hand-to-mouth family, to have such a cushy amount available. I loved knowing it was there, that bills would be paid, that I could go to the store and buy groceries for more than a few days at a time, that I could get the good toilet paper. That money meant security to me, and now my beloved wanted to give it away. We’d be right back to where we’d always been, struggling, waiting for the next paycheck, and terrified of an unexpected expense. But who was I to tell my husband what he had heard from God? Maybe God would see how much it meant for us to give that $500 and would bless us exponentially in return. I could do a lot more with $5000 than $500, right? So he wrote the check and we went on with our lives. The thing is, though, God isn’t a stock fund. He’s not something you invest in with hopes of high returns, he’s GOD. He doesn’t owe me anything and nothing I have is really mine, anyways. So you guessed it – nothing happened. No surprise checks arrived in the mail. No strangers bought our groceries in line while I was doing last-minute math to make sure we had enough to purchase them. No jewels fell from Heaven and no fish jumped out at me with coins in their mouths. We went about our lives, and I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed. It wasn’t until years later that I realized we’d been living in the miraculous the whole time. Life went on. My husband and I, early twenties, one job, a baby, a crazy commute, a mortgage, bills, food…. we still made it. We were able to give $500 to the Kingdom and we never missed a meal. It was scary a few times, but we still made it. A young couple struggling to make ends’ meet gave FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS and still survived. Heck, we made it to where I can buy the good toilet paper if I want almost anytime I go grocery shopping (and I do). This wasn’t amazing because God did something huge when we gave $500, it was amazing because life was NORMAL after we did it. We could easily have been hit with an illness, an accident, an allergy, a ticket… anything to throw us off and keep us from being able to pay what we owed. But we weren’t. We lived life normally, and it is nothing short of miraculous.
I encourage you, friend, when you feel like your head is barely above the water, when you feel like you’re only treading water and never getting anywhere, when you feel like you just cannot get ahead… praise Him for that. Because you could go under. You could be knocked down by a wave. You may be exhausted, but you are STILL GOING. God is not a bank account to be drawn upon and there is no promise that we won’t struggle. If you’re not seeing progress, praise Him anyway. If you’re not seeing your bank account swell no matter how hard you work, praise Him anyway. If your bills are always being paid just a little late, praise Him anyway. If your child didn’t make the team they wanted or get into the school you had your heart set on, praise Him anyway. Because He’s as much God in the moments of fatigue and frustration and disappointment as He is in the moments of triumph and excitement and success. Just as the wind doesn’t have to blow for you to know it can make waves, God doesn’t have to be extravagant in His blessings to show His goodness. Can He do it? Yes. Is He any less good when He doesn’t? Of course not.
Jesus walked the earth for 33 years, yet most of what we know of His time here is limited to the last three, the time of His ministry. Does only knowing about 10% of His life make Him any less God? Jesus was just as miraculous, destined, and mighty in the 30 years we know little of as He was during the few years of His public ministry. There is still as much wonder and miraculous in the normal as there was in the wonder and miraculous of what made the Bible. As Jesus walked to the well as a teenager, as He endured taunts for being born to an unwed mother, as He went through puberty, washed dirt from His feet, was tempted, was hungry, through it all he was STILL JESUS. The purpose God had for Him and the work He would do was still going to change the world, still had eternal implications, no matter how normal those years were. God was still doing a mighty thing. Isaiah 53:2 even tells us that the Son of God “had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.” Jesus looked NORMAL, ya’ll. Being born in a barn, parents being judged, looking just like everyone around him… none of that disqualified Him from being miraculous. His normalcy did not mean God was not still at work.
I’ll even go a step further and say that the cross was nothing special. It was constructed, roughly at that, of wood. Just normal wood, placed between two thieves, held together with normal nails. No jewels adorned it, no gold around it, just wood and nails. Yet just as He did with a normal lunch of bread and fish, Jesus took the common and ordinary, the normal, and did something miraculous. He took wood and nails and forever changed the relationship between God and man. Because in the hands of God, nothing is normal. Nothing is ordinary. We view our circumstances much differently in the eye of the storm than He does in the palm of His hand.
I want to encourage you, friend, that you are in the middle of the miraculous. When each day feels monotonous, when you haven’t seen a miracle, when the phenomenal seems far, you are in the midst of God’s goodness. When you feel discouraged that you haven’t seen a break in the trees yet, you are still on a path and God is as good and wondrous and loving as He will be when you get out of the forest. If your rescue, your healing, your provision hasn’t come yet, if your child isn’t developing how you expected, if your bills are more than expected, if your job seems to be drowning you or your relationship seems to be dying, you are still living smack dab in the middle of a miracle. Praise Him for where you are, be thankful for what IS there, and He will prove Himself time and again to be in control, even if you don’t realize until later that the unwanted path He’s been steering you along is the one you’ve always needed. You are not alone. You are not forgotten. Boredom is not the absence of God, nor is struggle. At the risk of sounding cliché, you may never see your name in the Guinness Book of World Records, but you can be assured through your relationship with Jesus Christ that you’ll see your name in the Book of Life, and there is nothing common, ordinary, or normal about that.
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