5 Things I Learned This Summer (2022)
These are the last days of the summer season here in the Pacific Northwest. The light is changing, fresh-picked blueberries are washed and bagged in our freezer, daisies and sunflowers spent. School has started in some regions, but here the yellow buses don’t begin their jangle down the streets carrying kids with backpacks full of blank paper with pale blue lines filling three-ring binders until after Labor Day.
This threshold moment is lit up for reflection. Before the weather cools completely and leaves fall in earnest, let’s look back over the summer season and catch a few fireflies in a jar before their light fades into autumn. Perhaps sharing my summer lessons will help you see your own.
From the serious to the silly and back again, here’s what I learned this summer.
Thanksgiving is a habit worth honing.
Thanksgiving is more than a feeling or a season of gratefulness. I am learning it is a habit worth honing.
What began as eucharisto in 1000 Gifts with Ann Voskamp where I made long lists of all the things I was grateful for has ripened into a practice I call tiny thanks where I name just 3 things I am thankful for from the day before. This small practice has been a journey of growth for me. I write them in my planner just for me. But if you follow me on Instagram, you can see them in my stories.
I began with the more obvious things like events and people, then shifted to looking for the very ordinary, plain, almost-missed-things like leftover pizza, laundry, and something one my Wonders said or did. Over the last year, I’ve begun including at least one particular that rises up about my interior life with Jesus such as a word from my Scripture reading, a prayer, a question, a glimpse of Jesus’ nearness or God’s character, some small thing happening in my soul that hits me as big.
As I practiced this small daily habit, my gratefulness has grown. I not only notice the gifts in my life looking back, but as my thankfulness sharpens, I might notice them as they are happening. Lately, I have found myself anticipating God’s touch ahead of me.
Henri Nouwen captured my experience in these words,
“In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize gratitude can also be lived as a discipline.
2. Notice the prayers you’re already praying.
I haven’t always counted my more subtle prayers as prayers, those unspoken zings, pangs, and leanings forward as I move through my ordinary day - padding down the stairs in the morning light, pouring coffee, writing, walking in the woods, buying pickles, pushing a child in a swing.
But Simon Weil wrote, “paying attention is prayer” and that has opened a whole new world of prayer to me. I am learning to count them all even if I miss them in the moment and only notice them later. (Grace.) I find prayers in all kinds of places - my tears, sighs, dreams, hungers, music, work, and aches. Even the smell of cilantro on my fingers when I am making pico de gallo.
When I read these words by Gunilla Norris, I realized that years before I went to seminary, I was already praying to go without counting it as a prayer.
“I invite you to become aware of the prayers that you are already praying. Perhaps you will be surprised at how full of silent prayers your daily round is, how full of meaning and grace.”
3. What if our circles are elliptical?
This question came to me when the moon surprised me in the middle of the daytime sky. I knew August would bring the last of four supermoons in a row and I was anticipating that full bright orb hanging large and low in the sky. Supemoons aren’t actually bigger though they are brighter. They are only appear bigger because of their nearness to Earth in their elliptical orbit around the earth. It was the ellipse that stood out to me that day.
Why am I always looking for perfect circles when an ellipse is simply a circle in perspective? Maybe my family, friendships, and faith are moving in elliptical paths. Maybe our good God is a gravitational God, always pulling us toward him not with varying degrees of love (He could not love us more!), but in an ellipse around him in various seasons and purposes in our faith.
Thinking of God as gravitational feels consistent with something God might have been saying when he created the universe with planets and moons and stars all connected to seasons and ocean tides.
4. The Wordle keeps me happily paying attention to the whole picture.
I just discovered the Wordle for myself this summer. Mike had been Wordling for awhile and having me help out when he was stuck. I started looking to be in on the solution earlier everyday until I needed to do it myself.
In case you don’t know about this craze, Wordle is a free, online, no log-in, once-a-day 5-letter, six-try puzzle. If that sounds complicated, it is not.
However, recently for the first time, I did not solve the puzzle in the allotted six tries. And it was because I neglected to use some letters that I had actually already discovered. It was as if I went blind for about three tries. It was bound to happen at some point, not solving the puzzle. But for all of my joy in paying attention in life, not seeing something right in front of me in the Wordle was not the way I thought it might happen.
It was a reminder to pay attention to the whole picture, not just a corner, or slice. This is for life, our soul journey, words out of our mouths and what’s behind them, and Wordle.
5. Being God’s more honest friend means I look at both the terrible and the beautiful.
One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, taught me that. His father committed suicide when he was ten years old and in some ways it marked his whole life but was not the whole mark of his life.
One Sunday when he wandered in to a church as a non-church goer, he heard this about Jesus,
“ Our inward coronation [of Jesus] takes place among confession, tears, and great laughter.
Those were the words of preacher George Buttrick that would capture Buechner’s heart. It was the “great laughter” part that wooed him. When he told his grandmother who wasn’t particularly religious, she recognized it as “Le Bon Dieu” - the good LORD.
Here is a great laughter moment I had recently with one of our Wonders, Moses. It felt like pure joy from another world but very much in this one. May you have these moments with the people in your life and count them as from Le Bon Dieu.
Buechner would go on to seminary and become a sometimes preacher and a full-time writer of both books about the interior life and novels (both spiritually formative). Buechner once said,
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
That perspective, which feels very much like Jesus’ own words while he walked this earth, have helped me learn to be more honest with God, myself, and others. If I am only willing to look at the beautiful in the world, in me or others, I will miss Jesus’ suffering (and everyone else’s) and God’s resurrection power to restore us from ashes to glory. If I only look at the terrible, I will become jaded at the very possibility of resurrection.
Buechner just passed away this August and while he might be gone from this world, his life goes on. And in my life his wisdom is still helping me learn honesty in how I look at the world. Our lives are full of the sounds of Him, our Le Bon Dieu. In the terrible and the beautiful, he is still our good God.
This might be an apt description of what we do in spiritual direction, listen together for the sound of God in our tears and laughter and honest experiences.
If you haven’t read any Buechner, here are a few of my favorite Frederick Buechner books to start with. These are affiliate links which means easy ordering for you and pennies for me if you order right from here.
