Normal is a setting on a washing machine

Only about ten percent of the world’s population is left-handed, yet of the seven U.S. presidents since 1974, five are left-handed. Those five are: Gerald Ford (38), Ronald Reagan (40), George H. W. Bush (41), William Jefferson Clinton (42), and Barack Obama (44). The two right-handed gentlemen are Jimmy Carter (39) and George W. Bush (43).

Some other left-handed people you may have heard about: Babe Ruth, Bill Gates, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Armstrong, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Paul McCartney.

It is thought, though not proven, that left-handed people have a bit higher IQ and are more likely to excel in sports. Yet, as recently as the 1940s and 50s there have been teachers who forced left-handed students to write with their right hands by tying their left hands behind their backs. Some students were paddled on their left hand in order to convert them. To write with the left hand was considered unnatural. The left-handed person was thought to be abnormal.

When I began my studies at seminary, our national church did not allow women to be pastors. There are passages in the Bible that are pretty clear about women keeping silent in the church. But a few women joined our seminary classes anyway. At that time they were doing something women were not supposed to do, something abnormal. Later, we, the church changed our mind, in part because of those first few brave women who felt called by God. How blessed we are now to have many good pastors serving the church of Jesus Christ, who just happen to be women.

Philip Yancey, in his book Soul Survivor, writes of growing up in Georgia in the 1960s, and of a pastor who “preached blatant racism from the pulpit. Dark races are cursed by God, he said, citing an obscure passage in Genesis. They function well as servants . . . but never as leaders.” (Waterbrook Press, 2003, pp.1-2.) In other words, “They are less, they are abnormal.”

There are children in our families, in our communities, in our churches who are made to feel they are less because they are homosexual. They are considered, by some, to be abnormal. Archbishop emertius Desmond Tutu, of South Africa, in a sermon preached in Southwark Cathedral in London in 2004, said, “. . . black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about—our very skins. It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given.”

The movie Temple Grandin (2010) tells the story of a woman who is autistic, who did not learn to talk until she was four years old, who was teased in school for her “strange” behavior, and who went on to graduate from college, and to earn a Masters and a Ph.D. She has written three books and now teaches at a university. She is a celebrity, but growing up she was considered abnormal. In the film, she says her mom and her teachers along the way “knew I was different but not less.” She also says, “I know there are a lot of things I can’t understand, but I still want my life to have meaning.”

I have three sisters, so there are four siblings. We are very different from one another, yet none of us is less. We are family. God created us an infinite variety. So what’s normal? Well, normal is just a setting on a washing machine.

Gary