Remember Lots’ wife (Luke 17:32)

Like many of you, I am anxious to file 2020 into the file cabinet and move on. It has been the most disruptive year in most of our lifetimes. All of us are anxious to get back to normal. And that’s precisely what I hope you DON’T do.

Perhaps the best analysis I have read about our country’s response to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic was written by Ed Yong. In “How The Pandemic Defeated America”, Yong poses a disturbing question: How could the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, politically admired nation in the world so poorly respond to a crisis of this magnitude? The article lays out his response. Towards the end of the piece, he offers this bit of counsel:

Despite its epochal effects, COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar.

Yong says the worst thing that our country can do is to go back to normal. NORMAL failed us.

The past year (and probably the next few months) has provided (and will provide) each of us with an amazing opportunity to reflect on our lives and to make some changes. I realize that for some of you that will be impossible. You are busier now more than EVER. But for many of us, the pandemic has interrupted our normal routine. You can’t go where you used to go or do what you used to do. We have been forced to spend more time at home, and more time alone. I have never had so many people ask me if I needed any help at the church. I completely get it. Most of us are willing to do anything to get out of the house. In the absence of our regular routine, many of us don’t know what to do.

Here’s a recommendation: how about you start thinking about your normal. Maybe it should change. Maybe you should change. This may be the last opportunity many of us have the time and space to make some radical changes to our lives.

God provided Lot and his family with a great opportunity to escape into a better tomorrow. Their hometown was being destroyed by flames, and God sent angels with the message that they should leave. God wanted to take Lot and his family into a new future. But Lot’s wife was so committed to her normal, that she looked behind her and turned into a pillar of salt. She got stuck, and missed the future.

A new future is upon us. Don’t miss it!

Use this moment as an opportunity to take a good, hard, long look at your life and see what needs to be changed. Don’t go back to normal. Michael Hyatt says we should rejoice over what we have been able to accomplish, recommit to what’s important, revise what we desire but may be currently challenging to achieve, replace what isn’t working, and remove what doesn’t contribute to our progress. Don’t go back to normal. Rejoice, recommit, revise, replace, and remove. Then repeat.

Then, I want you join me in my pick 1 for 2021 campaign. As we head into next year, I want you to pick one of each:

• A book to read

• A class to take

• A relationship to deepen or fix

• An amount to save

• A person to help

• A cause to support

• A workout to start

Don’t go back to normal.

Next week, we will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. In many ways, Christmas is a reminder of God’s refusal to allow the world to keep operating as it had for millennia. He decided to interrupt our normal, and invade time with eternity. Galatians 4:4 says “When the right time came, God sent forth his son…” God waited until the conditions were perfect and the time was right to stage the greatest interruption in the history of the world. When the conditions were perfect and the time was right, God sent change into our normal, and well, the rest is history. It was the right time.

And now is the right time. Don’t go back to normal.

In fact, don’t go back at all. Go forward.

P.S.

Since Friday is Christmas, and the Friday after that is New Years, this will be the last blog of the year.

If this blog has been a blessing to you, please share it with someone.

From December 28-31, 2020, we will share the most read + most watched messages of this year. Be on the lookout.

See you in 2021!