Postcards from the Mess #1
Faithful Friday: Summer Vacation Style
Hey friends, welcome to Summer!!
I hope you are surviving hearing your name being called through the house 17 times an hour and have officially accepted your new job as a short-order cook.
I am excited to introduce you to what our Faithful Fridays will look like this summer. Just like summer relaxes a little bit, I want our weekly newsletters to do the same.
So I am slowing the pace, taking a breath, and lessening the load for both of us. While I love getting into the nitty gritty with you each week, schedules are crazy, I never know who is going to be with me, and I just don’t have the bandwidth for a full deep dive every week with my boys home.
So instead, I thought I would just write to you from the messy middle. Think of these as my weekly letters home from the Summer Camp of Motherhood.
Each week, you’ll get a postcard carrying the lesson I am learning that week, a weekly scripture, and the song that’s been carrying me through it. Then there will be a short little blurb from me, digging into the current lesson God is teaching me that week.
Turns out summer has a lot to say. I’m just finally slowing down enough to listen.
Keep reading for our first postcard… and our first lesson of the Summer!
Summer makes me panic. There, I said it out loud.
I hear so many different moms talk about loving the slow mornings and unstructured days, but for me, I see long stretches of needing to entertain, refereeing fights between siblings, and schedule changes every week that give me heart palpitations.
If you have been around here for any length of time, you know that if there is anything God is working on in my life, it’s the need for control, the inability to surrender, and the desire to see what’s coming.
Summer takes all of these shortcomings of mine and throws them into a tailspin.
So I did what I always do when the wheels start coming off. I opened my Bible and found myself back in Psalm 16, only this week, I found hope two verses earlier:
“Lord, you are my portion and my cup of blessing; you hold my future. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.”
Psalm 16:5-6 CSB
David does it again. He shifts my perspective exactly when I need it most.
I was letting the blank week in front of me decide my mood before I even got out of bed. But I won’t find the peace and steadiness I am reaching for in my inability to surrender the white spaces of summer to Him.
The boundary lines God has drawn for me, no matter how shapeless they feel, will fall in pleasant places when I remember that He is my portion and my cup of blessing.
So this morning, when my boys and I were taking our dog for a walk, and they asked to stop and play in the creek for a little bit, I said yes. Even though every part of me wanted to say no. We needed to get back. I needed to fold clothes and water the plants.
I stopped and reminded myself that these are the moments I can be thankful for: unstructured days with the space to say yes.
This week, that’s what He’s teaching me. To let summer be unscripted.
