Normal

“Waiting at the station there’s a workday wind blowing… passersby. Mirrored in their faces I see frustration growing, but they don’t seem to notice; why do I?”

—Carole King

Last Sunday the pastor revealed at least to me the reason people keep saying they “just want things to get back to normal!” There is no normal, he pointed out. There never was. What they want is to be blinded again to their loss of control, so they can feel better.

There used to be a time, he said, before the pandemic, when people could cover over their fears with overshopping or overwork or just by staying in one place without moving. But when the cover of Pandora’s box lifted (this is my paraphrase) and evils flew out over the sky they realized just how not in control of the craziness they really were.

Then he suddenly turned —as if it had just occurred to him and it wasn’t in the program— to read Matthew 6 and (this was just a few hours after I had written my own snail version in Sunday’s blog post “Garden”:

Consider

the birds of the air

how they neither sow

nor reap

nor gather into barns

and yet your heavenly

Father feeds them.