i don’t suppose there is such as thing as normal life. there is typical life, meaning the things you did yesterday that you did today and quite possibly will do tomorrow.
but what, in heaven’s name, is “normal”? it feels like my life has seen almost every shade of upheaval during the past year and a half. now i know i’m being melodramatic here in the light of people in haiti or japan or even the people in the south who got their lives turned upside down by tornadoes this weekend. in that sense, most of my life has remained blessedly, undeservedly stable.
still, i have this terrible impatience sometimes, this overwhelming desire to get up and run somewhere — almost anywhere — so my mind and heart and soul are blown wide open to let the wild spring wind come rushing through. to borrow an image from manalive, i want to run around the world so i can come home again.
maybe that’s what it feels like when the soul is tugging us God-ward and our eyes just aren’t open yet.
here’s something more g.k. chesterton says that, i think, applies to this type of feeling (if ever i loved a man for his mind, i love g.k. chesterton for his):
For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.
— Orthodoxy, “The Flag of the World”
oh my goodness! with such a real warring of fierce delight and fierce discontent, is it any wonder we have to cast ourselves on God? i think life turns into insanity otherwise if we try to hold the two things in our soul at once in our own strength. we try (or at least i do) and inevitably slide down to one side or the other. and neither polarization is truly correct, because, while this world is corrupt and sinful and in bondage and cursed and will one day be destroyed and replaced with a new heavens and a new earth, it is something God created for us to enjoy and treasure and marvel at. He just designed all those things to lead us to Him — and we get stuck on worshiping the created rather than the Creator.
you can’t run home in the sense you want to yet, child. but home is always with you wherever you go, because you can never outrun Him. and wherever He is, there is Home.
