The Normal People

I started this blog last summer when I found out I was being deployed to Antarctica.  After I returned home, I decided to continue telling my stories...of my travels, my deployments, the amazing people I have met, continue to meet, life in the military, music, teaching, and more...

As I write this post, I am once again...on the road, to my next military assignment....to the next "edge of the earth" so to speak, to a VA hospital where I will serve as a chaplain for the summer.  It may not be as glamorous as when I deployed to SW Asia, or to Antarctica, or to Panama, or some other far away, exotic place, but...I go where they send me...and to have this tour of duty is a blessing.

Someone recently asked me, "Do you LIKE being on the road this much?"   Well...yes I am tired of living out of a suitcase.   Like so many people, I wish I had a regular, normal job, or a normal, comfortable life.  Sigh.  But, I don't.  Actually, I never have!

Many years ago, in my music playing days, one late night we (the band members) were tearing down our equipment after a gig, and the drummer and I began talking as we were prone to do.  I was wrapping up my cords and she was dismantling her drum kit.  It was late, and this evening was not a weekend, so the crowd was thin.  Weekend nights were packed with people, but not so much during the work week.  I commented, 'Why do they (the club owners) have us play so darn late if hardly anyone stays up this late during the week, much less go out to hear a band?'     The drummer chimed in, 'Yeah, the normal people usually don't stay up this late during the week...'

The normal people.   It made me chuckle.  But I knew what she meant. 

Some people have the blessing of living a "normal" life, whatever that means.  In this instance, it meant people who were blessed with full time jobs, people who worked during the week, usually day schedules, 40 hours a week and had weekends off.  Normal people are typically married, have families, a house, and all comforts of life that normal people have.

Normal people don't have to take jobs that whisk them away far from home or to the other side of the planet, because they have normal jobs, in the very city they live in!  They don't work have to work into the wee hours of the night, they work normal day hours, 8 am to 5 pm or so.  They don't have to work three part time jobs just to survive and pay the bills.  Oh, I should also mention, normal people HAVE JOBS.  Good, full time jobs with good, decent pay.

When I was in Antarctica, I met some very interesting people.  Some took the jobs down there because they had no job and no job prospects at home.  Some of them had lost their homes, had to give up their pets, had put all their things in storage while they worked in Antarctica for the 5 month summer season there. It was not "normal".

When I returned home, I was telling a certain person about what it was like down there.  The cold, the wind, the harshness, the austerity.   This person responded to me, with irritation,  "You could not pay me enough to go down there!"

Well.  I guess he had the blessing of having that choice.  He had a normal, comfortable life.

But so many don't.

And for so many, we were just not created that way.