Not Normal

My first memory is looking out the window at a thunder storm when I was almost two. As a kid I played outside a lot. I created elaborate tunnels to drive my cars through. I sang out loud. Unusual. Weird. Strange. Odd. Bizarre. Peculiar. These are antonyms for normal in the thesaurus. I think there was five years of mostly normal. People like normal. Lord, why am I not normal?

My older brother got sick and died when I was seven. My folks had no medical insurance and lost everything. I attended private school on a hardship scholarship. For my uniform I wore designer labels like Kmart and Goodwill. The rich kids were not impressed. When I was twelve I was almost big enough to play on the junior high football team but the guys whose value was diminished by my presence didn’t smack the coach around for it.

I’ve had two best friends (thank you Jim Shaw and John William Gordinier) but two friends in twenty years did not help to form my social grace or sense of value. I did not fit. I had many questions but very few answers. I was smart, sensitive, curious and introspective. Eventually, girls liked me and I found normal.

I am normal in my sin. I fail as others fail. I even like the same sin as others. In pride and lust I’m normal. In desiring what is not mine I am normal. In all the ways I have sought to supplant Your beauty, your acceptance, your favor and love I am normal. In all these terrible ways am I normal.

Where is the end of this? I’m not the same man I used to be. You continue to change me always. You have removed my heart of stone and given me a heart of flesh. I am too vulnerable. I love ‘til I ache. I give love that is consumed, given to others that don’t seek me out for it’s return. Will You prepare me to rightly receive love? Your love is life in me. Apart from you I am dead. Teach me to love as you love. Teach me Christ first.

1Jn 4:9-14
Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man hath beheld God at any time: if we love one another, God abideth in us, and his love is perfected in us: hereby we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.