Going Back to Normal

“Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.”
Jim Elliot

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I'm a completely normal guy. There's nothing spectacular or above average about me. I finished in the middle of the pack in college.

Unremarkable. Super Normal.

After college I worked in transportation for a couple of years and served at a youth camp.
After that stint, I pastored a regular church in a small town in Georgia. Tiny doesn’t even describe the church where my family ministers now.

I’m a normal guy.

My wife and I both come from working class families. We had neither silver spoons nor handouts growing up. We are the epitome of middle class people.

Although our neighbors and kids may not think so, as Americans in an obscure northern Portuguese village, we're pretty normal people. In fact, we’re so good at being normal, I like to say that we are exceptionally normal people.

Living abnormal lives.

We're not at all special, but a long time ago we decided that we were going to submit our normal selves to an exceptional God. It was a slow process that came to a head when we chose to do something that scared us like nothing else had before.

We made a decision despite the uncertainty and the fear that we were going to plow forward instead of sputter until we got stuck. We made a decision that, no matter what--that come what may, we weren't going back to normal.

We were taking the leap. With Robert Frost we were choosing the road less traveled. Figuratively, we happened upon that same yellow wood where the road diverged, and although it wasn’t our first time at that wood, this time would be different. Previously, every time we found ourselves at that yellow wood, we always kept right on taking the road that everyone else takes. The road more traveled. The road too traveled.

We just kept finding ourselves at normal. We just kept passing Go and collecting $200. The problem with that?

Life's not a game of Monopoly. Going round and round in circles gets tiring. It gets boring. One night I came to a conclusion.

I was tired of normal. I was tired of always going back to normal. Nina and I both got tired of going back to normal. Over time, we had wearied ourselves by allowing the everyday to imprison us to a life of low expectations.

So, I decided to do something about it.

But, before I tell you what we did, you need to know more about why we did what we did.

Let me tell you why we went from living in the normal to living in what I call the overflow.

Throughout my relatively short time as a pastor in the States, I traveled to several foreign countries. At that time, our church helped over twenty different missionary families preach the gospel both at home and abroad. After several invitations, I decided to go and visit some of those families.

I wanted to encourage them and get a better sense about how our church could be a bigger part of their ministry. They were serving in our stead far away from their homes, and I wanted to do something for them besides sending a check each month and making a phone call at random intervals.

For the most part, while pastoring, I was content in my normal life and with my normal circumstances. I also had no intentions of leaving for another church that was bigger or better.

I never wrote out a resignation letter only to hide it in my desk drawer in anticipation of that day when I could shove it in someone’s face.

I never put feelers out for other churches. I liked our church. No, I loved our church, and I’m certain that our church loved me. We had a good, comfortable situation.

We were every-church, if you will. Not quite Laodicean, but a long way from Philadelphian.

The church was comfortable. I was comfortable, and that was the problem. Though at the time I had no idea.

I began visiting at least one missionary family a year with the goal of visiting every one of our overseas ministry partners.

Something unexpected happened along the way.

Whenever I came back from a trip, I lived for weeks replaying it over and over and over in my mind. I relished the sights and sounds and smells, but most of all I adored the missionaries’ lives. I imagined how my family would react to their challenges.

Without fail, after every trip I allowed myself to live vicariously through those missionary families, until the “everyday” wrestled that vicarious life into submission and dragged me back to normal.

I went to Mexico and fell in love with the challenges created by a missionary's life there. I fell in love with the little brown-skinned girl who fell in love with my wife's blond hair and panty hose. She had never seen either before.

All throughout the church service in an unfinished block building with a sunken roof, no lights or running water, in a dirt-poor mountain village, she rubbed Nina's leg over and over again.

She dreamed of a life in America. She dreamed of panty-hose and blond hair.

I dreamed of verb conjugation. I dreamed of preaching the gospel and telling her about Jesus, in her language.

I spent a week in Mexico and ate authentic Mexican food. (When we got home, I vowed never to eat at Taco Bell again.) I used what Spanish I remembered from high school and tried to communicate with anyone and everyone. When I left, the missionaries who hosted us made sure that we knew, if we ever wanted to move to Mexico, we had a place to serve.

One year I went to Germany and saw a family ministering to the American military who were stationed there. Depending on changes in duty stations and assignments from the Army, the church might have thirty people attending services one month and two people the next. Yet they kept right on through thick and thin, even though most times it was more thin and less thick.

I saw another family struggling to gain traction with the gospel in a cold, humanistic German culture. Their kids attended public school in Germany, though their preference was to educate the kids at home. (In Germany it’s illegal not to enroll your children in the state-run education system.) They had no choice but to send their kids to German schools.

Late one night, during my visit, we quietly climbed the steps to go to bed, and my new friend stopped me as tears rolled down his face. He said, “Thank you, preacher. I don’t know many folks that would stay up and listen to me talk until 3 a.m.” My response was simple and completely heartfelt.

“That’s exactly why I’m here.”

The sacrifices those regular families made shook my pretty theoretical views. Those trips turned my world upside down.

Through it all I discovered one truth. I experienced something that made a huge difference in my life.

Culturally, the whole world isn’t exactly like the United States. Normally, it’s completely different from the US. That may come as a given to some of you, but seeing different cultures up close rearranged things inside of me.

Before I left Germany, one of the missionaries came right out and spoke his mind.

"So, you're going back to the States to raise support so you can return and help us, right?"

The next year, I tried to go to Nepal, and although the king had no idea that I was coming, the day of my scheduled arrival, he closed down the entire country. He was trying to stifle a Maoist uprising, not impede one normal American from visiting his sovereign nation.

He ultimately accomplished both.

He closed Nepal tighter than Walley World, and I wasn't about to go all Clark Griswold trying to gain access to a tiny country between China and India. I got as far as Hong Kong before the news of the closure broke. No flights in or out of the country. No cell phones, landlines or Internet - inside or outside of Nepal. And no word about when he might decide to open it back up. Closed. Indefinitely.

At the behest of my wife, (who had stirred up not a few friends and family back home) rather than immediately enduring another sixteen hour flight back to Los Angeles, equivalent to the one I had just completed, I spent two days in Hong Kong waiting to see if his majesty (or, even better, His Majesty) might change his mind.

For those two days, I walked around Hong Kong, and I fell in love. I wondered about churches and missionaries. I wondered who would tell the guy doing Tai-chi in the park about Jesus. I prayed. I drank tea, and I eventually went back home.

I never made it to the jungle to meet the former witch-doctor-turned-pastor who had almost been beaten to death for his new faith.

I never met the orphans, or the widows that I wanted so desperately to see in Kathmandu. More than anything that I missed, that stung the most.

A few days after I arrived back in Georgia, the king re-opened Nepal and I was able to finally contact my missionary friend. He found out I was safely home and then told me his opinion about why I never made it to Nepal. He said that the Lord didn't let me make it there because my wife wasn't with me, and that she had to visit if there were to be any hope of us becoming missionaries in Nepal--something we had never discussed before.

Then he laughed. But just a little.

After each trip, I learned something, and I grew. But, after each trip, I also left a lot on the table.

When I got back home, things always faded back to gray. They slid back to normal.

Until, one day I said, "...not this time."

That day Nina and I decided that we weren’t going back to normal anymore.

That day our hearts started packing for Portugal. (How and why we got there is another story.) Although we would only arrive sixteen months later, I never want to forget what Nina told me when I asked her about taking the leap into everything foreign.

“I’d rather be with you and in God’s will, on the other side of the world from all of our family and friends and everything familiar, than out of God’s will but close to all of that other stuff.”

That moment, when she spoke those words, she chose the more important over the more familiar. She valued commitment more than she feared the unknown. That’s what it means to live in the overflow. That’s the first step in escaping the normal...choosing the crucial over the common.

See, Portugal needed the gospel. Small town Georgia didn’t. Small town Georgia already had it. In the world of modern missions, Portugal has been virtually forgotten about. It hasn’t even been paid enough attention to make it to the afterthought status. There are more gospel-preaching churches in a thirty mile radius of that small town in Georgia than in the entire country of Portugal.

I know this because I preached in many of them. I visited many of them. I listened to their pastors on the radio. I fellowshipped with them. Were there lost people living in that small town in west Georgia? Yes, and there still are. However, it, like many other towns across America have become super-saturated with the gospel.

Sad fact #323: Every year that I pastored in that small town, a brand new gospel preaching church opened up. Most of them started as a result of division and strife that had been created within the local body.

But none of that changed the fact that the commitment to transplant a family of seven to Europe to live out our faith scared us mightily.

It's not the normal thing to do.

It should be, but it’s not.