Thoughts to New Covenant...

(guy who is OFFICIALLY NOT ME)

I cut my own hair.  Explains a lot doesn’t it?  Sometimes I’m pretty sure I miss a spot or 2, but I just can’t find it.  Other times, I’ll find a runaway patch of whiskers for days, and like a woodpecker digging for that bug in the tree, I will pull and pluck and tug at those for days…until I’m convinced it’s even.  Pretty sure I’ve left a bald patch once or twice doing that.  This week I finally got around to cutting my hair (usually an every other week occurrence though I was quite overdue).  Midway through cutting my hair…I slipped.  It wasn’t quite as drastic as the guy in the picture here.  It wasn’t so much that I slipped, but I went higher with the short guard than I typically do, and by that point I was COMMITTED to shaving my whole head shorter than routine allows.  I’m thrown off right now, because what was normal for me…FEELS unusually different (it’s probably hardly noticeable to most people…but man, my head is COLDER outside!).  For the next couple of weeks I’m committed to a new norm.

That works out good because for the next couple of weeks, here at New Covenant, we’ll be discussing just that.  Not my haircut, but ‘The New Norm.’  There are a lot of things in our world around us that we see and simply accept as ‘normal’. 

In the world of relationships (which we’ll be dealing with this week)- there’s a lot of norms that…well, they just don’t seem right.  Should it be right that we experience so much relational loss?  That relationships can come and go so easy.  That they can almost seem disposable  (and we’ll be ending our time this week in the practice of communion- a reminder that we are made and designed for RIGHT relationship, first and foremost with our Creator).

For those of us who are Christ followers though, we are called to be different, to stand out, to be set apart, to be weird, to be slightly ABNORMAL.  So we’re looking to establish ‘The New Norm’ in our lives, in our community, in our culture.  And in case it’s not clear- this IS NOT JUST FOR YOU!  We want you to regularly be thinking about- at your job, in your school, in your neighborhood, in your family- ‘Who should I invite?’  If you can’t remember the last person you invited WITH you…YOU’RE LONG OVERDUE!

We’ll also be talking about New Norms in the area of our finances as well as our attitudes and perspectives in the upcoming weeks. 

Normal in the world around us seems to be broken.  It’s time for ‘The New Norm.’