12.October.2026
An All-Inclusive Departure From “Normal”
A few weeks ago, the pastor said something that really made me think. Healing someone’s body is never contingent on their permission, their belief, or their willingness to call Jesus Lord. Sometimes healing is the very thing that opens their heart to Him in the first place, the tangible love that finally makes someone willing to receive more. But stopping there, treating the healing itself as the whole point and never offering what it was meant to open the door to, is what he called an all-inclusive vacation from being me. That single line became the seed for this whole series. It forced me to ask what normal is actually supposed to look like, and whether we were ever called to live it at all.
More people claim to be a Christian today than ever before, and it seems like more people have sat in a pew than at almost any point in history. But claiming the name and knowing Him are not the same thing, and that is exactly where we have drifted. Jesus Himself warned of a day when many would say Lord, Lord, we did all the things, and yet still hear, I never knew you. It was never about adding up salvations or what we did. It is about knowing Him, which is the whole reason I named this blog what I did.
That was never what God intended. He always wanted us to look like Himself, men like John Wesley, who rode an estimated 250,000 miles on horseback simply to keep preaching, because knowing Him compelled him to.
Somewhere between his day and ours, the church has drifted. Not all at once, and not with any one villain to point to, but a slow backward transformation from vibrant, I’ll-go-anywhere, see-people-healed-saved-and-delivered Christianity, into something far smaller. Stand up. Sit down. Kneel. Repeat. We have allowed compromise so steadily that we stopped noticing it was compromise at all. We have settled for a spiritual snack on Sunday, maybe on Wednesday, and then ate nothing the rest of the week, and we wonder why we feel famished and dying inside. Malnourished. Normal became a word for spiritually starving and calling it fine.
This morning, the pastor preached on exactly where that kind of life leads, and I want to give him credit for some of what follows, because it aligned with everything we’ve been discussing in this series. It validated it, and it underscored just how important this topic is for this time, and for this age.
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.
James 4:7-10
The pastor said total submission is not a once-a-week posture, rather it is the only door into actual transformation. The greatest miracle is freedom from the domination of sin, a life no longer under sin’s control but fully under His. That is tied to the blood and to the stripes He bore, and nothing less than dying to self actually gets us there.
He showed us what dying to self did for Paul.
And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? Acts 22:7
Paul was persecuting the church, ordinary believers, not Jesus standing bodily in front of him. Yet the risen Christ called it exactly that. Jesus had already died, risen, and ascended by the time Paul did any of this, and still Jesus identified Himself so fully with His people that their suffering was His own. As the pastor said, all persecution aimed at the body of Christ is truly persecution aimed at Jesus, and we are simply the physical presence standing where He would be seen, so we take the hit meant for Him.
And rather than letting that silence him, Paul was sent to testify to everything he had seen and heard, and he never went back to a normal life again.
Until you are ready to live as a martyr, the pastor said, you are not ready to die as a martyr. That is not a morbid thought, but is a measure of whether compromise still has a grip on us. Because a life that refuses to compromise now is the only kind of life that will not fold under real pressure later.
When the very Spirit of God lives on the inside of us, he asked, what do we actually have to fear? Not persecution, not the cost, not even death itself. He urged us to weaponize our own testimony instead of hiding it, because testimony is not only a memory of what He did once. It carries the expectation that He will do it again, for anyone who believes.
This is what a vacation from normal actually looks like. Not comfort. Not a nice break before returning to life as it was. A total departure from spiritual malnourishment, into a life that is finally full.
So here is the question I keep asking myself, and maybe you need to ask yourself the same question too. Where have I settled for a snack when He offered me a feast?
Make today count and see you tomorrow.
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