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--This devotion appeared originally on the blog "Growing Into Up" by Jennifer Heidinga, who has made it available here with permission and now also as a podcast!--

I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him. (Psalm 40:1-3)

We keep hearing ponderings about 'returning to normal' and forecasting as to what our 'new normal' will look like, but no one really knows for sure. The thought of it all is frustrating, confusing, stressful and even enough to cause fear. But over the past weeks as I let my thoughts drift I started to wonder what God's idea of normal is. Surely nothing like ours. After all, God's power raises the dead, God's love is so deep, wide and high that it's incomprehensible and God's peace surpasses all human understanding. And so, I did a somewhat strange Google search. I looked up information about 'God's normal.' Incredibly, a lot of results came up but the very first result on the page was an article written about how and why God entrusts us with trials.

In February I attended a worship conference. The keynote speaker was a worship pastor from the U.S. He talked about something that really struck a chord with me at the time. And now looking at our current circumstances, I am brought back to it again. He spoke of how the wilderness (or the trials of life) and the will of God are one and the same thing. Say what? If we were to go directly from where we are now to God's promise for our lives we most likely would not be able to stand in the promise that God has for us. God's promise is full of giants (David could never have conquered Goliath without knowing that he could conquer a lion and bear first). God's promise is often sought after but largely unknown. God's promise brings together everything that we have learned from him as we stumbled and maneuvered our way through our wilderness, through our trials in a way that we never could or never would experience if we had never tread across those wilderness paths.

Some may be going through a time of intense trial right now. The wilderness around you seeks to destroy everything that you've worked and trusted for. Seek God as you walk the path before you through prayer and through God's Word. It won't be easy because a wilderness journey never is, but when you finally start to see a glimmer of light on the other side of the dark desert you will know that what you experienced was not for naught.

I still don't know exactly what God's normal is, but I do know that his normal and ours are not one and the same. God is the one who creates with his spoken Word. He lay out signs that pointed directly to the coming Christ and then he sent His Son, his One and Only to come and redeem us all and the mess that we made of the world. Jesus went into the wilderness before He started his ministry, then he taught, healed and blessed on his way to the cross followed by his resurrection. None of that....NONE of that is our normal. But, it's God's normal. Our life right now isn't normal either, but maybe it's not supposed to be. Maybe our idea of normal is askew. Maybe our wilderness journeys in life are not meant to pull us into a pit, but to show us that while we may find ourselves in a pit for a time like David in Psalm 40, it's not for naught.

God drops us in wilderness places and brings us through trials to demonstrate His normal to us. His 'normal' love leaves a throne for a cross. It is unbounded and we can never be separate from it (Rom 8:39), yet he surrounds us with that love as we fight, grieve and walk the wilderness paths. God's 'normal' peace, hope, joy, faithfulness, truth and every other aspect of who God is, is his normal, not ours. So as we all walk, stumble and fall our way forward along the wilderness paths that still lie ahead of us, know that God is there. He is in that. He is with us. He will never leave us nor forsake us, but rather He surrounds us with every part of who he is. That is the best 'normal' that we can ever hope to encounter and so ahead we go into the normal of God, into the unknown wilderness, with our feet firmly rooted in his promises, and with a deepening trust in God and the truth of his Word.

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