My 7-year-old got the Holy Ghost a month ago. During the altar call, she went forward to pray for a little friend, and they both prayed through. Most everyone else had finished praying, and the service had ended, but for these little children, something special was happening. Both entered into intercessory prayer and spoke in tongues for 30 minutes or more. When she finished praying my daughter laid back in my lap and said, “Daddy, I don’t usually do that!”
As a father, I was ecstatic, but as a Christian, God spoke a word to my spirit through the circumstances. The service had ended. There was a fellowship dinner downstairs. Few people (including myself at first) noticed these two small children crying in the corner under the altar. Yet while the rest of the church was fellowshipping with each other, these children were experiencing the presence of the Holy Ghost… they were fellowshipping with God Almighty.
Two weeks later a single mother in our church was testifying. She has spent much of her life in and out of the church but has made a singular effort in the last two years to continue in the path God wills for her life. In relating a conversation between herself and God on fasting, she said something that again caught my ear. She testified that God had impressed on her to fast for a week, and she responded, “But God, that’s not normal! That’s not me!” While she did carry out the fast, her words rocked me just as my daughter’s had. I was forced to wonder: what would happen if we all didn’t do what was normal to us? As I sit here, I wonder just what God could accomplish if we all forgot what was “normal?” What if each and every one of us skipped a fellowship dinner to so something we “don’t usually do?” If God works through us, what would he do in our country and in the world if we just once decided not to constrain him to our own sense of propriety? I recollect how much was accomplished in the Bible when people stepped outside the box. It wasn’t normal for two beaten and shackled men to start singing an praising God at midnight in a jail. It wasn’t normal for a fisherman to walk on water. And it SURE wasn’t normal for a man to hang dying on a cross and speak forgiveness to those who hung him there.
My hope and prayers are that all of us will once again become like little children and do some things that we wouldn’t normally do. Whether we witness to someone we wouldn’t normally witness to or do a dance in a worship service when that “really isn’t us,” I hope we can, as a people, once again break the norm in favor of the Godly. Let’s see what God can really do when we forget to be “normal!”
I Peter 2:9 “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light:”
