Why Do You Want To Be Normal?

An acquaintance told me yesterday of something she did recently that was perceived as strange among her neighbors and she seemed to feel uneasy about it. It was not a “normal” thing to do for sure considering where she was in her life at the time, but you know what? God didn’t call us to be normal. In fact, the Bible calls Christians “peculiar”. We are supposed to follow God’s will and be obedient to His promptings and sometimes these things will look abnormal to the world. Building an ark when the world didn’t know what rain was could not have been seen as normal. Was it normal for an unwed teen girl to say, “ok, God, conceive a child in me”? When Paul, the murderous crusader against Christians started preaching the Gospel, it was not normal to those who knew him. Paul, of all people, didn’t have a right to proclaim Jesus. It was not normal for a man to get out of a perfectly good boat and try to walk on water, but Peter did it and he did walk on water until he took his eyes off Jesus. When we as Christians have our eyes fixed on Jesus and not on the freeway that the rest of the world is travelling on, He will send us into strange lands. It takes guts to go. The courageous Christian is counter-cultural, not conforming to the patterns of this world. Without Noah’s courage, we wouldn’t be here today. If Mary had said “no”, the world would still be stuck without hope and salvation. If Paul had told God that He had the wrong man, the Good News probably wouldn’t have made it passed the Red Sea. If you tell God no, who loses out?