Is Anyone Normal Anymore?

Last weekend we had our annual deacons retreat during which the oncoming deacons who are beginning a new term of service share their testimony of how they came to faith in Christ. I was struck this year by the number of men who had at least one alcoholic parent. As with most years, a great many of them also had been through a divorce of their parents as a child. Since divorce rates have been high for almost 50 years now, the number of men having grown up in broken homes was not a surprise, but I was struck by the number of men with alcoholic parents and the result that had in terms of periodic abusive treatment of them or their mother, and how it led to many of them abusing alcohol and other substances later.



Then on Thursday of this week we had a dinner event from the men's ministry at our church at which a man in our congregation shared his story of growing up in an abusive home in which he and his brother first endured the divorce of his parents and then later his father used his girlfriend to sexually abuse both of his elementary age sons. Since so few men are willing or able to discuss this sort of thing in a public event, it was a story that elicited in me both shock and outrage. I can somewhat understand (though I don't condone)how a man might resort to alcohol or chasing women after a hurtful divorce, but I cannot comprehend how a father could intentionally drag his young children into the cesspool with him. Hearing this man's life story made me wonder, in our society where perversion of many kinds is pushed as simply alternative lifestyles, how many other children have lived through this sort of thing. It made me wonder whether anyone is normal anymore.



Sexual abuse and drug use, including alcohol, are nothing new of course. It is well documented how perverse Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors were. Some have used this to argue that these things are not perverse, that we should accept them as normal since they have such a long history among 'great' people. We should ask folks like this man who told his story on Thursday instead. He was very clear on the damage it did, and how he struggled to eventually extend forgiveness to his father. It was not normal, and it certainly was not good.



One of the reasons that early Christians stood out in the Roman empire was that their moral lives were so distinctively different from the perversion that surrounded them. One of the great impacts of Christianity is the way it improved the lot of women and children in terms of ending abuse when their husbands and fathers embraced Christ. It may well be that apart from a Christian culture the abuse of sexuality and alcohol may be 'normal', but it has not been normal in cultures that have been dominated by Christians. We can expect to see more and more of this if our culture continues on its current path of abandoning Christianity.