Not Normal People

I’ve always wanted to be considered what you might call a normal person. You know, someone you can talk to at the grocery store; a guy who could sit next to you at a Colts game and scream at the appropriate moments; a music fan who can name the drummer in his favorite band, and who enjoys a great movie from time to time. In other words, I’d love to be someone who isn’t dramatically different, or off center socially or emotionally.

Of course, some people would say I already have a big strike against me. I’m a professional minister. A pastor may be defined as that person who can come into a party and change everybody else’s conversation in mid-sentence (“I’ll tell you the punch line later,” somebody usually whispers).

As a kid I was pretty sure the pastor at my church went to bed at 8:00 p.m. after a tall, cold glass of milk. I didn’t want to be that person. I want to be normal.

The problem is that I also aspire to be a saint. Here I am using the word “saint” in its broadest New Testament sense: a man or woman who trusts in God through Jesus, and through whom God is willing to accomplish great things in the world. The difficulty is that what we learn from history is that real life saints are, well, different.

Historian Donald Spoto cautions his readers that actual saints are “not normal people.” In fact, they can seem flat-out weird. An excellent case in point is Francis, a young man from the Italian village of Assisi who in the early 1200’s lived what most agree is one of the three or four most remarkable human lives ever observed.

Francis started out with everything going for him, at least the way we customarily define the Good Life. He was the spoiled son of a rich merchant. His teenage buddies nicknamed him rex convivii, which might be loosely translated, “king of the party animals.” He fancied himself a knight and managed to get himself thrown into a dank dungeon as a POW for more than a year. He was ultimately freed from prison, only to return to a life of aimlessness.

But on a warm summer day in 1205, Francis’ life changed forever. In the ruins of an abandoned chapel he heard the call of God: “Francis, don’t you see my house is being destroyed? Go, then, rebuild it for me.” In an event that he could never quite put into words, Francis gave himself to a life of selfless service. He forsook his family’s ample possessions, preferring to wear a simple peasant’s tunic.

As historian Thomas Cahill puts it, “His colorless vagrant’s costume would become the uniform of the early Franciscans, the world’s first hippies.”

To say that his straight-laced, stick-to-the-predictable-path father was disappointed by this turn of events is to put it mildly. Francis was escorted to the public square, where his father could beat some sense into him. This would be a public service beating, one that would provide a warning to any other boys in town who might thumb their noses at common sense. But in a dramatic symbolic gesture, Francis stripped off his clothes and returned them to his father. From now on he would answer only to his “Father in heaven.”

Francis’ life, compromised by malaria and personal deprivations, lasted but a short 44 years. But in that time his sincerity of heart and commitment to the same gracious attitude to every person, friend or foe – “May the Lord give you peace” – revolutionized Europe and the flow of Western history. He had but one aim: to obey the teachings of Jesus as he understood them. By doing so, he fulfilled the call he had heard on that hot summer day: He helped rebuild the faltering Medieval Church.

I think I’m like most people. I imagine Francis of Assisi and (more recently) Mother Teresa of Calcutta to be splendid aberrations. How wonderful to live in a world with such extraordinary human beings. But God cannot possibly want me to live a life that strays so far from the norm.

Lately it’s occurred to me that my understanding of what is normal has not served me well. For me, “normality” has been defined as a limited commitment to Jesus – one that wouldn’t compromise my relationships with friends and neighbors. I don’t want to shut down conversation at parties, for goodness sake. Francis, on the other hand, humbly assumed that normality for a follower of Jesus would mean taking the Master seriously: speaking, thinking, and acting as Jesus would.

It’s likely that our love affair with normality is what costs most of us the chance to be extraordinary. We become afraid to take risks. We tremble at being thought different. We hope and pray that our children live normal lives, thereby limiting their imagination of courageous, counter-cultural ways of being – ones that might actually turn the world upside-down.

I’m not saying that everyone is called to be a Francis or a Teresa. Theirs is a drama reserved for the very few. But make no mistake: Faithfulness in the smallest of commitments changes reality – every time we seek peace instead of payback, every time we extend grace to strangers, every time we choose integrity over duplicity, every time we say “May the Lord give you peace” instead of venting our frustration.

The hinge is small on which history turns. What we learn from real life saints is that our next words or actions might make, quite literally, all the difference in the world.

It’s an old illustration. But it’s also spot-on.

Once upon a time, the animals decided they should do something meaningful to meet the problems of the new world. So they organized a school. They adopted an activity curriculum of running, climbing, swimming, and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming; in fact, better than his instructor. But he made only passing grades in flying, and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to drop swimming and stay after school to practice running. This caused his webbed feet to be badly worn, so that he was only average in swimming. But average was quite acceptable, so nobody worried about that – except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of his class in running, but developed a nervous twitch in his leg muscles because of so much make-up work in swimming. The squirrel was excellent in climbing, but he encountered constant frustration in flying class because his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He developed “charlie horses” from overexertion, and so only got a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was a problem child and was severely disciplined for being a non-conformist. In climbing classes he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but insisted on using his own way to get there…

The moral of the story is straightforward: Don’t drive a squirrel nuts by asking him to excel in activities for which he is not gifted.

That is the essence of the apostle Paul’s teaching in I Corinthians chapter 12. He says to Christians of every generation, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” (12:27) In other words, if a gathering of disciples is a team, everybody gets the ball. There are no exceptions. We are all ministers with a lower case “m,” and not one of us is expendable.

Then, with rhetorical questions that are just as amusing today as they were twenty centuries ago, Paul wonders what it would be like if Christ’s body had a grand total one part: “If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? …As it is, there are many parts, but one body.” (12:17, 20)

Even though diversity is what makes a body actually operate as a body, there hasn’t yet been a church in which a rabbit Christian didn’t wish she were an eagle, or a duck failed to hope that God would somehow answer his prayers so he could climb like a squirrel. But the Lord of the Church wisely remains deaf to such requests. Each of us has already been equipped to serve, and to make a difference wherever we go. The drama of discovering our own giftedness and where God intends to deploy us is too wonderful to trample with a lifetime of deep sighs that God somehow got our call wrong.

Maybe for you the next step is a “first serve” opportunity at ZPC. Check out our Volunteer Expo on April 20, or contact Coordinator for Connection Terri Shrader any day of the year. Come and find out that God has a curriculum for your life and your passions that satisfies like nothing else.

Stopping Long Enough to Hear God

Once while staying in Orlando, Florida, my wife and I got what a couple of Hoosiers would call the chance of a lifetime. The local news affiliates announced that the launch of the next space shuttle was a "go" for 3:18 P.M. on what was predicted to be a beautiful afternoon. In fact, the reporter threw in that this was only the second time in the history of the shuttle program that the "launch window" had a 100% possibility of perfect weather. That's when we made our decision: we would hop into our rental car and drive the 55 miles from Orlando to the Kennedy Space Center to see this spectacle for ourselves.

We budgeted plenty of time to make the trip. After a leisurely lunch we got onto the Florida Bee Line and headed east -- and immediately merged into a logjam of hundreds of cars. At first I figured we were stuck in a tollbooth backup. But the congestion extended beyond the booth all the way to the horizon. Within thirty minutes it dawned on us that we had voluntarily become part of a 55-mile long traffic jam, and were surrounded by thousands of people who wanted to see precisely what we had come to see.

We crept across the state, starting and stopping, until at 3:15 P.M. we were still at least 20 miles from our goal. That's when the myriad of rental cars and mini-vans around us began to park alongside the road. We did the same. People turned up their radios, got out their cameras, gathered in clusters on the shoulder and looked vaguely toward the east, across Florida swampland. We could hear the countdown: "...three, two, one...” and I wondered what exactly we'd be able to see so far away.

It was incredible. A bright orange flame on top of a pillar of smoke rose from the ground at a speed much faster than I thought possible. It all lasted no more than 30 seconds. The shuttle disappeared from our view into the haze. During that time, however, the gawking group of strangers with whom we were standing was overwhelmed by a staggering silence, punctuated only by an occasional, "Wow!" Just as quickly, reality returned. As if on cue we all jumped back into our cars, cutting across medians and racing to get an advantage over everybody else in the traffic jam that was now headed west.

But for just a few moments we had had a mutual encounter: together we had experienced awe.

Why did so many people think a 30-second thrill was worth the hassle? In the middle of the state that advertises more entertainment highs than any other, people were famished for the opportunity to stand, even at a distance, in the presence of something awesomely larger and more powerful than themselves.

That, I believe, is why people come to worship. Presented with an ever-growing menu of self-fulfillment opportunities on Sunday mornings, men and women willingly endure the hassles and distractions of coming alongside other worshippers to hear, just possibly – if only for a few moments – the Voice of One whose presence overshadows and infuses the rest of life's race with meaning. They come for an experience of awe, in the hope that they might encounter something that will bring their frantic lives to a stop.

There’s just one problem. When worshippers come in hope of hearing the Voice, what they get instead are the voices of mere mortals: people singing off-key, gossipers next to the coffee pot, crying babies, and (scariest of all) preachers.

Preaching is a messy business. I fully agree with the sentiment, "Unless God speaks today, I have nothing to say." So far, however, that hasn't prevented me from opening my mouth in countless worship services with little or no idea what the Holy Spirit might be up to. But I have learned something over the years: God speaks, even when it appears that all of the worship leaders are stuttering. I have stopped being astonished when someone says, “What you said this morning was exactly what I needed to hear.” God is the one who orchestrates needs and communications in ways that far supersede the expectations of the worship planners.

What can we do to have a better chance of hearing God’s voice? In a sense, we need to pull off the road. We must break our routines. We need to stop long enough to tune our ears to God’s frequency. He is speaking – in every conversation we have with someone else, as we walk toward our car in the parking lot, in planned services of worship, as we supervise playtime and bedtime for our kids, and whenever we watch weather fronts approaching.

The temptation, of course, is to close our ears too quickly – to plunge back into our manic routines because our lists of things to do today are So Very Important. But that is a formula for missing the meaning of life by attending to all the details of life. May God meet you somewhere on the side of the road this week, as you stop to do nothing more than ponder his presence…and feel awe.