So, it appears you are normal after all

Years ago, a guy by the name of John Ortberg wrote a book called Everybody’s Normal Till You Get To Know Them. I have often joked that we are all normal until you get to know us, because I truly believe ‘normal’ is overrated.

The trouble is we tend to have a default that says I am not normal.

The proliferation of such a story within us simmers away and it purges some, perhaps much, of our potential.

2016 was a crisis year for me. For reasons that I cannot go into here, I felt as though my character was under severe attack. It coincided with my reading of Dr John Townsend’s The Entitlement Cure. I read that book cover to cover and felt that it highlighted a weakness that I had — that I was overly sensitive to needing to be understood, to be respected, and to be praised. I truly wondered whether I was narcissistic.

For nearly an entire year I sat on a desolate island of brutal character reformation.

I am glad I sat there. I am glad I allowed God to clamour through my soul. And in all good conscience I needed to be there.

But two years on, I find I have a different perspective. I am able to judge myself more accurately. Two years beforehand I thought I had serious character faults that I needed to mature beyond.

The 2018 me can see that the kind of perspective that the 2016 me didn’t have. Only now can I see that there was a latent effect of grief that I hadn’t taken into account, but should have.

Now I know that the over-sensitivities that were piqued in the 2014–2016 period were due to external factors (losing Nathanael and other difficulties I am not at liberty to publicise) impacting upon my highly-sensitive personhood. It is only now that I know that being a highly sensitive person is normal.

It just seems that I am one kind of normal person.

It did me no harm to sojourn through the desert of 2016 — the worst year of my life.

God carried me through a year where he stripped me back and began the process of rebuilding me.

I felt in that year I had so many critics, yet I still don’t know the truth of who was for me and who was against me. It seems to matter little now. The main thing is that God got me through, and I’m better today, and I see better than I have for years. And it seems that everybody else benefits from the benefit I have received from God.

What I have learned is that I’m normal.

You may not think that is remarkable. But perhaps you might ask yourself, am I normal?

You are. You most certainly are.

No matter what you have or don’t have, you are about as normal as the next person, no matter how abnormal you might be geared to think or feel you are.

For years now, it has bothered me that I’ve been a highly sensitive person, until I realised the strength in such a predisposition.

It is easy to be criticised for being a highly sensitive person, yet that is an unbalanced view.

There are such advantages personally, interpersonally, and for others in being a highly sensitive person.

The truth is the world needs more highly sensitive people, and that we may be the hope of the world. And perhaps God’s kingdom would flourish all the more if only more highly sensitive people would come to see themselves as normal rather than as abnormal.