A New Normal...We have heard the words repeatedly the past couple weeks (it seems like months!). We hear them spoken in press briefings. We see them illustrated in television commercials. We read them in numerous memes on social media.
A New Normal...
At times the words inspire me. At others, for some reason, they ring with melancholy. I have some thoughts about Normal vs New Normal that I'll get to in upcoming posts. Today and tomorrow however, I want to take it back a couple thousand years and change. So for today, let's think about the New Normal of a Silent Saturday.
We call it Holy Week. For the band that followed Jesus into the city gates, in what is now known as The Triumphal Entry, the week didn't seem so holy; especially come Saturday.
It was Silent Saturday.
The adoring crowds? Long gone. The bewildered Temple marketeers? Business as usual. The blood-thirsty self-serving religious elite? High-fiving their victory. Heaven? silent. The would-be savior Jesus? Ingloriously nailed to a cross and now buried. And his piece-meal group of followers? Locked in windowless isolation. Fearful. Hopeless. Questioning. Abandoned.
This was their New Normal.
Their normal had been completely enveloped and invested in a living prophet; a water-walking, storm-calming, sight-restoring, words-of-life-speaking, counter-cultural, emerging king. Really, that normal was actually fairly new in itself. For most, their prior normal had been a mosaic of condemnation, hopelessness, directionless wondering, and falling short. But at Jesus' touch, normal had changed.
But that was then - as recently as a day ago. New Normal is fear. New Normal is hopelessness and heartbreak. New Normal is isolation - as much internal as external. New Normal is abandonment.
Something to think about with New Normals however...
Though moments can feel like eons,
often New Normals are only transitions.
Saturday's silence is only Saturday's New Normal... My mind wants to run on a thousand tangents of application; especially in our current social-distancing, self-isolating, mask-wearing situation. But I'll allow your applications to be your own (and mine, mine).
This is what I know...
A resurrected New Normal is coming.
Silent Saturdays give way to the sunrise of Sunday. And in that sunrise, there is new life.
God, I'm not satisfied with my normal of silence and isolation. But I trust you are creating a resurrected New Normal... that in reality, is anything but normal!
For now...
D
