Redeeming Summer

Summer hasn't left us yet. What a gorgeous NW day. But autumn is coming, as it always does. And I get this "can't put your finger on it" feeling in my gut when the end of summer peeks at me. Kind of a sad, defeated feeling, like the child who is REALLY tired but doesn't want to go to bed and his mom makes him go to bed. That's how I feel about autumn coming. It is a good season, but it's disappointing that summer always has to end.

Summer has always been so dang fun for me. I love summer--you can garden, its warm, you can wear shorts, flipflops, tanktops, get tan, mow the lawn, pick berries, swim, eat popsicles outside, dinner al fresco!, grill, play outside, sleep outside, camp, see shooting stars, did I say play outside?, my mom doesn't work in the summer, go to Eliza Island, go on boats w/ out getting really cold, the sun doesn't set until after dinner or later--there is a lot to enjoy, but...I love summer so much that it is one of my idols. Idol: "a material effigy that is worshipped" (http://www.wordnet.princeton.edu/). Worshiping anything that is not God. For instance: In the deep of winter, I long for warm sun so much that my attitude is changed by this longing--to the point that I get impatient, grumble, complain because of the weather. In the summer, when its sunny, I have what come close to anxiety attacks if I don't spend most of my day outside, in the sun, having fun...its no wonder my home has been such a wreck these past two months. And so, I must repent. And then allow summer to be redeemed in my life. So how can I redeem summer? For me, I think it is by cleaning and keeping up with my duties as a wife and "house manager" and mom even if it means skipping a few minutes (okay an hour or two--or, gasp, a day) of the warm weather (without having an anxiety attack about it). Or maybe by ordering my day better (wake up earlier to do a load of laundry in order to play outside later). In the winter, I tend toward that condition called "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (who doesn't?), and so I must be all the more vigilant to not despair about the weather.

And so, as summer comes to a close, I am doing some belated spring cleaning as well as some heart cleaning: asking Jesus to root out the idols in my heart to replace them, by His grace, with Him.