On a farm you have a menagerie of animals. Horses, mules, cows, goats, chickens, pigs…One of my childhood joys was all the animals. They had different personalities. Different qualities. Had different needs. And that brings me to the pigs.

I have never understood their love of mud. My brother Zan and I would go with Pappy to “slop” the pigs. I’d watch with amazement as they would eat that sour food collected from the dinner table. They acted as if it were fillet mignon. Or the corn husks. Mercy! Pappy would carry a couple of five gallon buckets down there and once again, the pigs thought a banquet was being given. In the mud.

They laid in the mud…played in the mud…that slimy thick stuff all over them. Then they would lie in the sun to dry. As if they were living in the Ritz Carlton.

I think about “normal” a great deal. That my “ normal” is not your “normal” and your “normal” isn’t someone else’s. Where we live and who we live with tend to determine what we define as “normal”. What we deem as acceptable.

If we live in family that loves one another, protects one another, puts God in first place..we define that as normal. If we live with someone who abuses us verbally or physically and God is not revered, unfortunately that is our normal.

Living in an ungodly environment puts us (just like those pigs) in a nasty, unhealthy place. We don’t even know it because we have never known anything else. Our normal is a “mudhole”.

The Good News. The Gospel. Life with the Father. That is the real normal. Speak the truth in love. Tell the Good News. We don’t have to live in the mud. Jesus has given us life we cannot even imagine. He will walk with us here where circumstances are hard and He will receive us to the place He has prepared for us.

No matter how great the home we grew up in or how poor the home…He can make all things new and He can heal to the uttermost. Jesus wants to be our ‘normal”. Just let Him.