summer
Summer makes me long for timelessness.
By that I mean both the sensation of being tied to no particular time or schedule and, simply, eternity.
On summer weekends, we often linger by the neighborhood pool in the evenings, talking and laughing with good friends while our children and their children splash and swim, the sounds of a game of Marco Polo mingling with the chirping of cicadas. Adam loves the echo in the bathrooms in the pool house, and every time he wanders in there, water dripping from his legs, we hear him singing operas in front of the mirror. From time to time, one of the children will call for a parent. “Look, mom, I can swim under water like this…” We sit there together for several hours, catching up with each other outside, where the breeze is warm and the light golden. I love summer light.
Summer brings boxes of fresh produce every week from the CSA program we joined where Kevin works. Lately the boxes are brimming with red leaf and romaine lettuce, kale, arugula, yellow squash, carrots, turnips, broccoli, sugar snap peas, napa cabbage, scallions, and bok choy, all from a local organic farm. We feast on simple meals—salads, fruit, fish. As the sun soaks into our skin, we naturally grow lean, more energetic, and still more active.
In the mornings, I long to linger over coffee as the first light of day spills over the horizon, while the breeze is still cool and the post-work out adrenaline washes over me. I want to forget everything else and wander out to my flower beds for a few hours to touch the soil and water everything tenderly, smelling the new blooms and cutting them for the house. Summer, for me, is about smelling, touching, tasting, breathing… living and savoring. Summer exudes passion with the heat.
Do you remember Under the Tuscan Sun? Of course, I loved the book by Frances Mayes more than the movie, but both are favorites of mine, and not because of the details of the story. It’s the prose the publisher describes as “rich” and “golden” that mesmerizes me, wrapping me in all the sensations of summer, tugging at my longing for the freedom to be timeless and simply sentient. I am reading another book right now about which I intend to post a review for BookSneeze, and it’s a perfect summer book—a book about pilgrimage, inspiration, and the truth that it is precisely because Christians are both body and spirit that our Savior came first to live as a man. It is a book that urges us to press our feet against the earth and feel it, to shed all the clutter and move freely, to taste and see that the Lord is good, because blessed is the one whose only refuge is in Him (Psalm 34:8). I keep thinking, I love this book, and I know why. It touches at the heart of my deepest longing. But don’t be misled—I don’t yearn for hedonism. I yearn for all the abundance of God.
So, at the risk of sounding trivial, I confess that I struggle with marking time in hours, especially during the summer. This beautiful, reckless season makes me crazy with the desire to sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, and wake when I’m rested. But it isn’t actually the season that births the longing I feel. Summer reminds me of my passion for timelessness, but the yearning is the echo of eternity. It’s a desire that God has placed in my heart (Ecclesiasties 3:11). And it isn’t actually time itself that shackles me. God created a way to mark the days when He created the sun and moon:
God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. ~Genesis 1:5
In all of scripture, time is not spent, it comes, like a plant not withering but blooming. God created time to build unto a great crescendo: eternity living deep with Him. No, it isn’t time that wraps chains about my wrists, it’s the way that I feel forced to mark the passing of hours. It’s the feeling that time slips away before I’ve finished Responsibility instead of the truth that it builds unto the finished work of God.
Recently I learned that the first clocks were invented by Benedictine monks to regulate and divide their days toward specific, consistent disciplines—prayer, meditation on scripture, and work (The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith, 175). I find it so ironic that a tool first meant to draw human beings consistently to God has become the very thing that often makes me feel less able to linger and savor and taste God’s goodness.
Sometimes these days, as I hold my coffee mug in one hand and put plates in front of my sleepy kids at the breakfast table, I look out the door to the screened porch and feel such longing to live outside of time. And then I smile at one more blessing, knowing that the thing I truly want is the life that’s still to come. The ache I feel to linger is the yearning to sit at God’s feet; the longing to be simply sentient is the hunger of my spirit to see more clearly.
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. ~1 Corinthians 13:12
The joy I find in the warm, indulgently fresh flavors of summer is actually the faintest weight of fruit from the Tree of Life, sitting in the palm of my hand. One day, I’ll be able to pluck it freely and taste that the Lord is good. And then I’ll splash in the cool waters of the river that flows from His throne. All this golden light I love right now is but a shadow of the light there will be when He alone is its source. And timelessness? Well, it’ll be forever, and there’s no night there.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. ~Revelation 22
