Absent

Summer is always like this. 

 School lets out and we get busy.  That's just how it tends to go in the home of a youth minister!  Whoever coined the phrase "the lazy days of summer" was first of all not married to a youth minister and was certainly not referring to an adult!

I think back to my summer days as a kid and they were glorious...

no school, fewer clothes to wear, sprinklers to run in, plastic wading pools to fill with the hose, metal slides that were too hot to touch, melty fudgesicles dripping down my hands, hand cranking the windows down as I was climbing into a HOT car that had been parked  for a while, sweaty legs sticking to vinyl seats,  picking fresh produce from the garden, shucking corn, swim team practice twice a day, swim meets on the weekends, (and a bucket of KFC to go with that!), climbing "my tree" to kick back and relax, camping trips with family and friends, church BBQ's in our back yard, fireworks, parades, long car trips to see family, floating the river,... the list goes on and on.


(This is me and my daughter in front of the house I grew up in!)



  These are the kinds of memories I want my kids to have too. I want the "lazy days of summer" to ring true to them even in the midst of camps, teenagers, and what sometimes seems to me like chaos.  I want them to smell sunscreen and be transported back to their days as a kid when mom made smoothie popsicles, and they ran in the sprinklers till they shivered! I'm sure with four kids my mother was more than frazzled on many occasions, but I never knew it. All I knew were the "lazy days of summer", the care free, pure love of simplicity.

  So even though summer is always like this and being in youth ministry makes it busier, my goal is to make our summer feel like "home" too. A place where my kids can come back to in their memories and dwell for a while!