The Sunday Letter
There is a pleasure of summer that is not strictly Southern, but one that unites individuals, families, and friends from all around the country.
As the days get longer and the ground and the air heat up all around us, we look for an opportunity, or maybe just an excuse, to indulge in something that gives a little joy through every one of its flavors. What I am talking about is the local ice cream stand.
Just the other evening, Misti and I gave in to exactly that excuse. We made our way to a little stand that has sat in that exact spot for years, the same one with the hand-lettered menu and the line that spills out onto the gravel, and we waited our turn in the warm air with everyone else.
There is nothing like it. You drive, or bike, or even walk to that little beacon of summer as the sun starts its descent, and you see the people already crowded around. These stands of delight have stood in the same spot for decades. You step up to the open window, where a high school student is working their first summer job, and you order something right off the menu, however you want it. Then you step away with a cone or a cup to savor, and you watch the children getting absolutely covered in ice cream, or waiting their turn with a kind of holy impatience.
I do not know why a thing so simple stays with me the way it does. Maybe it is that everyone is welcome at that window, the child and the grandparent, the local and the stranger passing through. There is no wrong way to come to it. You just come, and you are met with something good.
And maybe that is what I love most about it. We are all there together, in the same small spot on a warm evening, and yet each of us is enjoying it in our own way, our own flavor, our own quiet moment. Separately, but together. That is the whole idea.
This week, Blessed South finished its first one. I built it hoping it might be a little like that ice cream stand, a place worth coming to, where the South is set out and shared, and where each of you can find your own taste of it, in your own time, together with the rest of us gathered around.
Until next Sunday,
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
The ice cream stand is a small light people are drawn to as the day cools, a place where anyone can walk up to the window, just as they are, and receive something good they didn’t make themselves.
That is a quiet picture of grace. A light kept on. A welcome with no entry fee. Joy handed through the window to whoever comes.
And yet the picture only goes so far. At the ice cream stand, we still have to give something in return. We hand over what we earned, our money, our effort, before the good thing is ours. But His grace does not work that way. The only thing we bring to that window is ourselves, just as we are. We do not pay for it. We cannot. We simply come with empty hands, and we are filled.
We do not have to be anyone in particular, or clean ourselves up first, or prove we belong. We come, and we are met with something good that was ready for us before we ever arrived.
The God I know keeps a light on like that. Not a porch light that asks who you are before it shines, but one that burns for anyone still looking for the way home. “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist wrote in Psalm 34:8, and I think he meant it plainly, the way a child means it on a summer evening with the joy still running down their hands.
So if you have been standing back, wondering whether the welcome is really for you, let me tell you what I have found to be true. The light is on. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.