At this point in the fall when you are skimming this devotional I imagine the program year is well underway. Kickoff, rally day or homecoming day, a distant memory buried under the weekly calendar of events that lists all the activities of the church ranging from AA meetings to committee meetings, choir rehearsals to staff check-ins, youth fellowship and fellowship hour. Of course, we can’t forget worship on Sunday mornings.
And yet, I began writing this in the early part of August, when it is slow around the church, and the kids are not yet back to school. The days feel like one continuous day. But I’m sitting in what has become one of my favorite spots to write and reflect: the gazebo at the park where my youngest’s baseball team practices a couple of times a week. Where I write allows for a touch of a breezeway, which is especially welcome after a hot or humid Mid-Atlantic summer day. A few trees act as an extra canopy around me. The leaves filter the early evening light onto me in gentle ways. I am close enough to see some of the action and far enough away that I won’t get hit by a pop fly.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Massanetta Middle School conference with a handful of youth from our church, singing and playing, and now it feels like a whole other world as afterwards I found myself traveling through multiple time zones to catch up with high schoolers from our church who were at the Youth Fest in Iona. No energizers in the Abbey chapel but the persistent sound of the island’s bleating sheep continues to ring in my ears. At this moment, as I finish this writing, I’m sitting in the sunroom of the manse, our home, remembering how it always felt like at least dusk or dawn the way the light lingers in Iona, as I gaze out at a darkening sky above a row of purple and pink hydrangeas becoming overtaken by the wild summer ivy that is relentless these days. Especially if one does not keep up with the weeding.
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