Peter’s Progress

I had a great time hanging out with some friends on the weekend from Northern Ireland, the land of lilting accents, the Mourne Mountains and Giant’s Causeway. In 1998 I volunteered for a month at the Christian Renewal Centre that overlooked Carlingford Lough in Northern Ireland. Every year in July, during the “marching season”, the centre held a Bible Week. Christians from all over the country would gather to hear preaching and teaching, and demonstrate unity at a time  of year when tensions run high, even to this day.
I was struck by the thought “What is normality?” Being July, our hosts were concerned about security in some high-tension or no-go areas. There was a high police presence. There was tangible fear when we were having lunch in a pub and started talking about church and some of our comments revealed there were Roman Catholics among our group – we were obviously in a Protestant pub! But fear is all relative. I was more fearful sleeping in a room at the centre with no burglar bars.
It felt so strange. A young woman in our group remarked tearfully how freeing it was to walk down a street not wondering if she was going to be mugged or worse. Normality?
Back to now. I was griping to someone about how the electricity outages meant my geyser hadn’t heated up and I had been forced to have a cold shower. I realised mid-rant that they don’t have running water at home and have to use a stand-pipe on a street corner to fetch water. My wife’s grandmother came out from Scotland with her father who was a coal miner. They started out in a small corrugated iron house. Today my social peers expect to advance rapidly to a designer house, drive big cars and live the good life. Normality? Jesus would niggle and needle people’s acceptance of what was normal. He would point to the abnormal, topsy-turvy values of the Kingdom of God. The victory of God was a rugged cross. I’m left thinking how Jesus challenges my accepted idea of what is “normal”.