Is Normal Just Around The Corner?

Is normal just around the corner? What is normal? Is it when you can extend a handshake or hug someone again? Depending on where you live, when you can get back to work. Take off the mask and attend a concert, sit on the beach, attend a major league baseball game? When the economy comes back? Regardless of your perspective things are going to be different.

Is back to normal when you get your job back? When you can pay your bills or your kids get back to school or you can see your elderly family members. When you can go to a restaurant or take a vacation. Fill in the blank.

Hopefully, as a result of COVID millions have had time to think about their lives and what’s important. Some hope their lives will change in some significant way. Maybe we’re hoping for something different, maybe even an adventure, but we end up settling with the usual. 

No one planned on COVID or any other personal tragedy. Things happen that are out of our control. In the middle of adversity we can develop a different perspective. Recently some of us have or are going to discover a roller-coaster adventure that we didn’t plan on. We need to hold on.

Thousands of years ago God asked Abraham to leave all the things he was familiar with and go to a land he had never seen and winds up wandering for years. Jacob and his sons go to Egypt looking for groceries and four hundred years later Israel pulls up stakes and heads for home. 

The fishermen Peter, James and John heard the master’s voice and threw their nets aside to follow Him. Get ready, the old is past and the present and future are going to get interesting. Saddle up your horses.

Is an adventure a thing we make happen or something we choose or does it choose us? 
An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not something we choose.” C.K. Chesterton

Abraham was not looking for the one true God, but God showed up with an invitation. Many of us can miss God moments so easily because our plans and expectations can become our hindrances to seeing what is and what can be.

As a result, we can get stuck in perpetual discontent and think, “This is the way things ought to be!"
We can get so committed to arranging our happiness that we miss precious moments right in front of us. We don’t think of what might be around the corner because we think we know what’s coming. We seek our happiness in temporal things because our hearts have nowhere else to go. Sad, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Could it be that we’ve missed something along the way? Has trivial distractions and the tyranny of the urgent clouded our vision of what is important?  Do we make so little of eternity by magnifying the significance of our own lives and diminish the reality of the next life to come?
                     
                       We make nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing.  Blaise Pascal 
          
Embrace what God has said about the life to come and how it impacts us today
Set your affections on things above, not on earthly things. Colossians 3:2
If you read history, you’ll find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were those who thought the most of the next world. CS Lewis

He has set eternity in our hearts. Ecclesiastes 3:11

No eye has seen, no ear has heard and no human mind has conceived the things that God has prepared for those who love him. I Corinthians 2:9

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth...but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  Matthew 6:19-21

Even though eternity could be just around the corner for you and me it is to be lived today!
I saw a big frontier in front of me and I heard somebody say let's go. Saddle up your horses. We've got a trail to blaze. Through the wild blue yonder of God's Amazing grace  let's follow our leader into the Glorious unknown.

This is the life like no other. This is the great adventure. So come on, get ready for the ride of your life. Gonna leave long faced religion in a cloud of dust behind and discover all the new horizons just waiting to be explored. This is what we were created for.   The Great Adventure - Steven Curtis Chapman