Remembering Today

 

This week, we are remembering and rewinding and reviewing important moments from the past. Yesterday, we honored Aretha Franklin, whose voice defined a generation and moved souls. Today, I want to focus on your summer time memories.  

Perhaps you grew up going to a cabin every weekend in the summer.

Or you may have vivid vacation memories of being in the back of a station wagon on a road trip with your parents ~ visiting national parks.  

Perhaps for you it was a week at summer camp where you met new friends and feasted on s'mores.

Or did summer mean that you hopped on your bicycle after breakfast spent all day with your friends playing baseball or helping your grandmother in the garden.

When you think of summer in your youth, what stirs and swirls in your mind and heart?

For me, summer time was resting and relax - even boredom as my parents worked full time and we did not take many vacation trips.  I remember playing kickball in our backyard or hide and seek with the neighborhood kids.  I remember my parents' garden in the back yard.  I remember going to the Iowa State Fair to see the butter cow (for those who don't know ~ that is a cow carved out of butter ~ which somehow seemed so much cooler when I was younger and now I wonder ~ why was that a thing?) or the largest hog or eating a corn dog and then riding the tilt-a-whirl (not a winning combination!).  Summer time had a different feel as the stalks of corn slowly grew under the Iowa sun.  

Our past shapes our present.  Our thoughts today have been formed by what has happened to us.  What we think of as normal, for another person might seem exotic.  What we found boring as a child another might have seen as a great adventure.  You are who you are because of experiences, encounters, events ~ both internally and externally.  Sometimes the best way to think through that truth is seasonally.

What has been a blessing this summer for you?  When you look in the rearview mirror of June, July, and August 2021 ~ where did you sense God's presence moving in beautifully mysterious ways?  I pray you might comment with both a memory from your childhood and a memory from this summer so that we might share together!  May the God who is present in every season of life stir in your soul as you reflect and remember today.

Amen.