Smore Summer Please!

Summer has officially started and life has changed… at least for me. I am a horrible friend/relative most of the year. I work six days a week, as I know many of you do, and my day off is filled with chiropractor appointments, grocery shopping, tedious errands and time with our three beautiful grandchildren. But that’s about it. Moms, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, not to mention good friends, get left by the wayside for months and months at a time. And then summer hits. My husband’s birthday always lands near Memorial Weekend so it becomes the marker that if I want to live as anything other than a workaholic recluse who has estranged herself from every family/friend she ever had… then I better kick into summer gear. Summer gear for me means “take time for people” gear. As a pastor, I take time for my congregation throughout the year: weddings, funerals, birthdays, babies born, elders ill, families broken, children learning, youth gathering. But in all honesty, I don’t take that same care of my extended family or friends. But summer is different. Last weekend a friend from Haiti was in the States to visit her family and came through Michigan to spend some time with us. We had a blast. I rearranged my schedule so we could spend time wandering through art galleries and second hand stores in Jackson. After stopping back at work for a few hours to finish up the “musts” there, we headed back to Jackson for a family/friend picnic at the Cascades. Little did we know there would be fireworks to add to the color of the evening. Our kids, their wives, and the grandkids all rendezvoused at a picnic table near the basketball court eating fried chicken and homemade strawberry shortcake. A good friend from the Detroit area drove over just to hang with us for the evening. It was a great surprise as we saw him walking from a distance with one of our sons and his family. Three trips to the porta-potty and two elephant ears later, we went home well satisfied. Another friend drove over from the Irish Hills area on Sunday and joined us for worship. Two others, a retired couple my husband met through his handyman business, showed up to worship with us also. We celebrated ten graduates and allowed tears to flow as we remembered those who gave it all that we might worship freely. Our tummies were filled from the delicious breakfast we were served earlier that morning in honor of our graduates and all their families. After worship, I slipped into the car, picked up a friend who needed a ride to the hospital to see her husband, and spent a couple hours visiting and praying with three others who spent the holiday weekend in a hospital bed. After a good, solid, and comfy two hour summer nap, I gave an hour or so to my good and faithful garden plants, all struggling to get an ounce of my attention, as well. After saving a few and praying last rights over a few others, it was time to run off to spend the evening with a bunch of cousins and their kids. They have owned property in the area for a couple generations but we hadn’t meshed our schedules well… before now, anyway. We cleared out the night… so there we all sat, around a raging campfire in the middle of a tree grove about 10 acres deep in a 20 acre parcel. We smored it and told stories, laughing so hard, our visits to their porta-potty seemed rhythmic. Friends came and went, kids were turned into their sleeping bags and tent flaps eventually folded over. We drove home refreshed, renewed and realizing that summer isn’t about sun, water, and parades. Summer is about reworking our schedule in a much more healthy way that not only allows for, but demands priority of, greater things. Best of friends feel they were never apart, and deepest family ties are bound even tighter. I hope you got the cue sometime this past week that summer has begun. If you can’t remember the last time you cleared out a calendar for that second circle of family, or even the first… If you only “see” your friends on Facebook to talk about “old times” instead of today’s times… turn off your TV and computer and go enjoy summer. My mother-in-law is planning to barbeque dinner for us a little later today, so I’ve got corn to shuck. See you around sometime soon… if we all make time for what really matters most.