‘I’ve grown accustomed to your face,’ the song lyric proclaims. Indeed life with its ever-changing hues and prisms brings us innumerable opportunities to become accustomed to a person or place or condition. So many years ago when I began working at Southern Illinois University @ Carbondale I started on the second shift. The hours were 5:00 P:M: – 1:00 A:M:. At first, my working hours seemed very strange but I determined that I would get used to them as I had secured the best job that I had ever had.

The vacillating vicissitudes of our lives can deliver us lifestyles that are onerous for us and damaging to our psyche. Being Food Insecure is a terrible condition that millions across our planet have become horribly accustomed to. Their waking hours are spent primarily in the search for enough coins to purchase the very basics of sustenance. Poverty and food insecurity and lack of economic opportunity are generational self-fulfilling prophecies made by conditioning people for many years. Finally, they become accustomed to their lot in life as members of the Untouchable Cast.

Some are in churches where increasing demands are placed on the congregation to provide money for the leadership’s targeted needs which often enhances the leader’s own bank account. The minister gets increasingly wealthy and the members become increasingly poorer. Yet many of these folks have become accustomed to their subservient lifestyle in order to achieve the pronouncements of the minister. Many at Jonestown 45 years ago willingly drank the Kool-Aid in their blindness to the bizarre situation that they found themselves in.

Certainly, the New Normal has touched all of our lives at one time or more. Our Pandemic changed our world and it is yet to be ascertained how deep the movement of the geological plates of our world has been disturbed. We learn to live with the changing chapters of our lives. Readjustment is required. A sense of place is necessary. Faith in something bigger than we are is essential.