No More Endless Summers

June was an unbelievably busy month. One piece of evidence of this was that every single Saturday was booked with either a family event or church event of some sort: church picnics, weddings, birthday parties, baby showers. That this is evidence for our busyness shows that our weekends are usually pretty mundane, and if I’m busy then it’s because I’m still working on the sermon for Sunday!

July might well be similar. Along with the fact that my wife is one of our DVBS teachers (which means busy prep this week and busy days next week for her and additional child care for me), we have a couple of church families dealing with serious illness. As difficult as it is to imagine perhaps, there’s a part of me that gets a little tense and whispers a prayer each time the phone rings because it could be someone telling me that a loved one has died.

After DVBS we begin three weeks of vacation, time-off which will involve spending time with family, going tenting, hanging out at my in-laws camp, and, hopefully, getting some relaxing reading done. Of course, given the phone calls I await, our vacation could find itself edited in one way or another—that’s part of what it means to be a pastor.

Once we’re back from vacation, we have just a few weeks before the fall arrives. Strange as it sounds, it sometimes feels like the summer is already over! All our time is essentially spoken for. A time of year that used to stretch into forever now disappears, or so it seems, before you get the chance to enjoy the concept of unscheduled days.

I remember when I was a kid, summer seemed endless. Granted, sometimes I found myself impossibly bored. But there was a part of me that relished that feeling of having days and days of simple relaxing, reading, and a whole lot of nothing to do. It really gave me the sense that there was a definite change involved in the shifting of season besides those due to weather. I experienced time differently. Life wasn’t in as much of a rush as it might normally be.

Without waxing nostalgic too much, a part of me misses that experience. I recall when I could spend hours reading through a stack of deliberately chosen books (admittedly, not everyone’s choice of summer activity). I still have lots of books I would love to pour over thoughtfully, enjoyably, even prayerfully, but rarely do I have time to get to most of them. I miss having more leisurely time.

True, I do get some time like this. But with a family, time alone is a special gift. And with a vocation that could potentially even interrupt vacation time, it can be even harder. A consequence of this is that it can be hard to get that to place of being able to rest even when you are on vacation. Your body might be on vacation, but your mind is a hive of activity, a bundle of thoughts that prevent genuine Sabbath. There is more than one way of being still. Even if I’m physically still, being spiritually and mentally still is a whole other matter. I hope that while I’m on vacation with my family I find myself able to be still in both ways. While I might not have any more endless summers, hopefully I can catch snatches of summer here and there. Like anyone else, I sure could use it.

Screen-Time

This, I think, is the longest I've gone without posting since February. A combination of getting busy with other things, various distractions, etc., is the reason for my absence. Not that many out there were anxiously awaiting the uploading of any new reflections on my part. It's also summer, which means that life tends to take on a different sense of rhythm. We're trying, as a family, to enjoy more time together. For me, one of those crucial things enabling us to share such time are trips to one or other of the various beaches we have within driving distance. What I like about the beach is that there is nothing to do there except play in the sand with my daughter, watch my wife play in the sand with my daughter, read, maybe play guitar, and generally lie around, enjoy a cold drink, some snacks, and, most times, take the opportunity to video-tape snippets for our home movie collection.

We've also, as a family, made a new rule for the summer: reduced TV time. That is, we've all agreed to choose one video a week to watch. So far the day for videos is Friday. In case you think such a rule unrealistic, there are a few caveats: first, if Ella, our three year old, is visiting someone else, she's allowed to watch TV (say, at her grandparents' house). Second, if my wife and daughter are away for a day or two, daddy gets to watch TV. Though I still try to keep it to a minimum. Third, home movies are the exception. Within reason, we can have home movies on more often. This is good because over the last couple of weeks I've been transferring our homes movies to DVD.

What's surprising is that our little Ella hasn't found this discipline as challenging as I would have thought. You see, almost everyday she would watch a couple of videos. Moreover, it was often the first thing she would ask for when she woke up. "I want to watch a video," she would tell me. And on many occasions I would agree, if only to give myself more time to myself, to get breakfast, etc. And my wife and I also haven't found it terribly hard either. Only when they're not home for a couple of days, which happens with some regularity since my in-laws live reasonably close, do I give into the impulse to put an end to the uncomfortable silence that pervades the house with their absence. Yet even then, it's often not so much because I want to but out of habit or just because . . . like I said, the house is quiet and empty without them.

What's also surprising is how much we can enjoy a video or TV when we watch it but how little we actually miss it when we don't have it. When I was in university I used to watch a lot of TV. My roommates and I always had cable TV. And then one year I found myself with a small, 10 inch TV and no cable. All I had was one or two channels, and in poor quality. But I never missed it. Quite a comment on our habits that we can spend so much time on something that ultimately we hardly think about when it's not available or when we make a conscious decision to limit our use of it.

I wonder if we could apply that same logic to computer screen-time? And just when I got back into posting!