Never Go Back to "Normal"!

This gets at a reality I have taught about for years. Stable and normal do not exist and never have. We are always in transition. Theologically I suppose a case can be made that the longing for a good quality of stability and normalcy is a yearning for the eternal reign of God. But in the here and now, not to change is to be stagnant. We want our children to grow up and not remain perpetual infants. We want to keep growing and learning. When what we have imagined to be "normal" is disrupted, we talk about getting "back to normal," but that is a fictitious illusion. Yes, we will be aware that the current situation has changed us in unexpected (and not always welcome) ways. When we try to go "back to normal" we idolize a fictionalized, romanticized nostalgia and evade embracing present reality. Whether parents of college students keeping a child's bedroom for when they return home, or a politician promising to bring back 1955, the new reality is relentless. Failing to recognize and adapt does lots of damage. So I am learning what it means to be a 73 year old caring for my wife with Alzheimer's and her 93 year old father locked down in a senior living residence, just as I learned to be a college student, husband, father, pastor. I had never done all of those things before. In the same way we will all need to learn to live in a new reality we have never experienced before. If we try to force a return to the old normal, we will break ourselves and each other.