Never Settle for Normal: The Proven Path to Significance and Happiness - Softcover

Parnell, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1601429061 ISBN 13: 9781601429063

Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Discover the personal meaning and gladness you hunger for—without settling for normal!

Every human wants to matter and be happy, which is as it should be. God made us to resemble and reflect His worth as we enjoy our true identity in Him.
 
But we too often swap that calling for the trifles of this world, pursuing cheap substitutes to fill the craving of our souls. As Jonathan Parnell puts it, we settle for “stupid normal” over the transcendent, even though this world can never satisfy our hopes and dreams.
 
In Never Settle for Normal Jonathan speaks to the heart of both skeptics and searchers by addressing their deepest longings. With insight and passion, he examines the key tenets of Christian faith—creation, fall, redemption, new creation—and reveals the life-changing glory of the Christian story in a fresh, new light.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Parnell is the lead pastor of Cities Church in Minneapolis. He is a graduate of The College at Southeastern and Bethlehem College and Seminary and has served as a longtime writer for John Piper’s Desiring God website. Jonathan and his wife, Melissa, and their seven children, live in the middle of the Twin Cities.

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Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled  with glory.
—1 Peter 1:8

1.
THE STUPID NORMAL 

And I don't want a never ending life
I just want to be alive while I'm here.
-"Spirits," The Strumbellas


There is nothing necessarily wrong with normal. It all depends on how you’re using the word.

A lot of times normal is good for you, like that garbage bag that needs to be taken out—the one with the little hole in the bottom that leaks a trail of some unidentified substance from the kitchen to the front door and demands an extra five minutes to retrace your steps on hands and knees with a paper towel.

Normal like that is an everyday sacrament meant to train humble hearts and level heads. That’s why it’s good for us to put on our socks one at a time, scrub the frying pan with a sponge, and stand in line for an hour just to buy a sheet of stamps so we can mail out our Christmas cards. This book is not about turning your nose up at menial things.

We need menial things.

Instead, this book is about not settling for the normal that has become our cultural mind-set. I’m talking about the kind of normal that pretends God doesn’t exist, that casts a vision of life devoid of ultimate reality and then acts like we’re better off that way.

I’m not talking about your nine-to-fivejob that feels boring. God bless your boring job—and I think most books that would tell you anything different are a sham. So I want to be clear from the start.

You’re not going to find in these pages a message that runs with the whole “find your inner champion” glibness. You don’t have an inner champion. You have an inner brokenness that desperately needs to be healed by Jesus. All of us, including me, are sinners who have bought into the lies around us, at least at some level. And if we’re really honest, we’ve likely fallen for them hook, line, and sinker. That’s because the lies are so many and so common that we don’t recognize them as lies. They’ve become too normal. It’s what I like to call “the stupid normal.”

LIFE IS LIKE [A CUP OF HOT] CHOCOLATE

I first heard my daughter Hannah use this phrase when she was four. It was a cold Minnesota night as we were getting ready to leave our local YMCA. Hannah was standing beside her brother and sister as they waited patiently for our van to warm up in the parking lot, which is the sort of thing you do in Minnesota. The kids had been so compliant the whole evening that I promised them each a cup of hot chocolate when we got home. Hannah, however, was not impressed by my reward, so she tried to sweeten the deal.

“Can we get it at Ana’s house?” she asked.

Ana was our girls’ best friend who lived a couple of doors down. We had sipped hot chocolate with her and her family several times to wrap up afternoons of winter sledding, but on this particular night we just didn’t have time.

“No,” I replied smiling, “we’re going to drink it at our house tonight.”

And that’s when she said it, with the unforgettable face of unfiltered disappointment. “But we just have the stupid normal!”

Now, my four-year-oldwas not a hot chocolate connoisseur. She had no extensive research on which to base her claim that the hot chocolate I made was somehow inferior to others’. In that moment she just knew that the hot chocolate she drank at Ana’s was better than the stuff I made at home. Maybe it was the whole experience itself, maybe the company, maybe some extra marshmallows —I don’t really know. But for whatever reason, my hot chocolate just wasn’t the same. She knew there was something missing. She knew there could be something more. According to her assessment, our house just had the stupid normal.

And too often, that’s what many of us would say about our lives.

If we were to sit back and consider our everyday routines compared to the depths of reality—the depths we’ve at least heard to be true—a lot of us might look as disappointed as my daughter. Even if we know the right things to say, we’re rarely satisfied by how this knowledge contributes to the way we live. The grind of this life can get so monotonous. The labor never pays off the way we imagine it will. The vacations never deliver what we hope for. Even our most anticipated joys fizzle, leaving only fractured memories.

Is this it? Is this all there is? Something has to be missing. Surely there is something more.

We all wonder those things sometimes, even those of us who consider ourselves Christians.

We think about the bigness of this planet: all this life, all this action, all these sunrises. And then we take a look at the stack of trifles we’ve been buying into from this world: the ads that define the essence of joy, the pop lyrics that determine our value system, the magazine covers that set our standard for beauty. Not to mention the “calculated barrenness” being shoved down our throats.1 It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that all this air we’ve been breathing is a smog of lies. We’ve been running after something deep, but we’re not even scraping the surface. The psalmist tells us it’s the fool who says there is no God (see Psalm 14:1), and yet that’s the anthem we’ve all learned to sing. It has become normal. That’s why I call it “the stupid normal.”

THIS WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE

You shouldn’t feel strange if you’ve felt disappointed about these things. Instead, you should feel strange if you have not.

This is the issue at the center of the human experience.

It’s the issue our ancestors dealt with before us, and it’s the issue especially worth dealing with today since we live in such a secular age— an age that has “progressed” beyond the need for genuine faith, or so it seems.We now live in this moment of history in which our everyday existence plays out in what one philosopher has called “the immanent frame.”2

“No,” I replied smiling, “we’re going to drink it at our house tonight.”
 
And that’s when she said it, with the unforgettable face of unfiltered disappointment. “But we just have the stupid normal!”
 
Now, my four-year-old was not a hot chocolate connoisseur. She had no extensive research on which to base her claim that the hot chocolate I made was somehow inferior to others’. In that moment she just knew that the hot chocolate she drank at Ana’s was better than the stuff I made at home. Maybe it was the whole experience itself, maybe the company, maybe some extra marshmallows—I don’t really know. But for whatever reason, my hot chocolate just wasn’t the same. She knew there was something missing. She knew there could be something more. According to her assessment, our house just had the stupid normal.
 
And too often, that’s what many of us would say about our lives.
 
If we were to sit back and consider our everyday routines compared to the depths of reality—the depths we’ve at least heard to be true—a lot of us might look as disappointed as my daughter. Even if we know the right things to say, we’re rarely satisfied by how this knowledge contributes to the way we live. The grind of this life can get so monotonous. The labor never pays off the way we imagine it will. The vacations...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1601429061
• ISBN 13: 9781601429063
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland