My summer to heal: what can recovery from this year look like?

the monthly letter

The melding of spring into summer always heightens my senses — my skin and eyes and ears alert to the thick dew of spring-watered trees and grass, the scent of a freshly mowed lawn, the sound of various birds all finding their voice in the woods behind our house, the cacophony of music from passing drivers, finally able to crack their windows under the sun’s warmth.

But this year, I wonder about the impact of the past 14 months on those senses. Have I -- swarmed with so much information and pain and looming potentialities -- lost my ability to see, savor, feel?

In early spring, I noticed some of my senses dulled.

Burgers on the back porch and last-minute ice cream runs didn’t seem to have the potency they once did when life felt simpler.

Do you feel this, too? The subtle assault on the simplicity of life? Could it be that we’ve become too grizzled to retrieve the ministry of the simple, the small — His reach for us in the minuscule … His playfulness?

Though perhaps some of the intensity that we’ve known is lifting, we can’t walk in the reprieve of it all without allowing our souls to recover from where we’ve been.

You know this, I suspect.

The first bonfire of summer or the end-of-the-year celebration didn’t feel quite the same as it once did. No transition out of something hard is entirely a transition into the next thing if we haven’t let ourselves grieve and be received by Him for where we’ve been. Stifling the grief of my dad’s death, unknowingly, as I welcomed two new children into our fold meant that I still wore heavy parts of it upon my back many years later, also unknowingly.

With this flash of an email, I am inviting you to where He is inviting me this summer: considering these months ahead to be your recovery months. Months to recover your love for Him … but, really, months to heal and remind yourself of His tenderness, His closer-than-your-skin-ness, and … His playfulness with you.

It gets complicated when we consider both the grieving over the last season and also finding His playful tenderness within this current one. We humans want to codify our life in God. We want to make it to be a 5-point sermon, follow the rules. We expect new growth to be linear, upward, onward.

But even in the worst of times, God gives His people the mystery of still waters. He plays with us, and He receives us in our grief. Sometimes (I’m learning), the co-mingling of simple expressions of His love and my deep pain, exposed before Him, is exactly what my soul needs in order to restore.

This summer, I’m leaning into that awkward tension where I cry it out over the losses that I didn’t count until now, just as I’ve caught a breath from the intensity — and I also become more watchful for God in the simple moments: the hummingbird at my window yesterday.

This summer can hold both for you, too.

{Last summer, we heard from you that this free Summer Adoration Series helped shape your walk through the intensity of 2020. We’ve made some slight tweaks and are re-introducing it for this summer of recovery: join me in falling in love with Him (again) in the simple, the small.}