Summer. It’s popsicles, pool parties, sunscreen, watermelon, late nights, and sleepovers. It’s air conditioning, family reunions, camping trips, and water balloon fights. It’s Vacation Bible School. It’s swimming lessons. It’s fireworks. It’s ice cream.
It seems like it comes and goes in a blink, as we’re carried from packing to unpacking to laundry to the pool to a friend’s house and back again. Summer is a hummingbird, darting from flower to flower, wings a-buzzing, never stopping.
It’s the fast season — where plants grow and flowers bloom, water rushes off melting glaciers and insects fill the skies. All nature moves quicker with this season of warmth and prosperity.
And so I feel it, the earth spinning in a circle under my feet and me…not as firmly planted as before. I long for the long cold winter nights by the fire with a book. I remember the slow pace of late fall, with its ponderous thoughts and spiritual revelations.
I’m like the gangly sunflower, too tall for its roots. Stretched and leaning from the weight of it all.
In any relationship there will be seasons — times of quiet togetherness, times of new growth, time to pause and reflect. The summer season sometimes feels too busy for God with all its comings and goings. Its easy to wonder if I’ve left Him in the dust or become too distracted with all my doing.
But God is always with us. I’m reminded that this life is a rhythm of fast and slow, always ebbing and flowing with the continuity of it all. There is the busy, and there is the idle. God is there with me while I rush my kids into the car with matted hair and sleepy eyes. He’s there as we count sleeping bags and pack ice around the milk. He’s right in the middle of our messy house with dirty dishes piled up and smoke-scented laundry stacked high.
He’s with us as we count our many blessings before shutting our tired eyes on sunburned cheeks.
God is guiding and leading and challenging and teaching and directing our lives even in the busiest of seasons. There is no where we can go where He is not there, working in us to accomplish His great plan.
For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him. Philippians 2:13 New Living Translation
There will be slower seasons coming soon. There will be times to contemplate and times to stop and stare with awe and wonder. There will be sunsets over snowy meadows. There will be cups of hot chocolate and Bible study by the fire.
But for now, we’re humming and stretching and enjoying and experiencing.
And Jesus is keeping right up with us.
I’ll never let you down, never walk off and leave you. Hebrews 13:5 The Message
I Very much enjoyed your photos…too tired or lazy at this time to read your postings, but i must come back to any one who references Philippians 2:13. Thank you for sharing.