The Sunday Letter
August is not letting go of us without a fight.
The heat this week did what it always does down here, leaning on everything from mid-morning clear through to dark, the kind of heat that has you planning your whole day around the shade. And yet. For all that summer is still sitting on us like a wet quilt, the close of it is already showing around the edges, if you know where to look.
The school buses gave it away first. They came back in force this week on the roads around here, big and yellow and stopping every hundred yards, and if they have not turned up in your part of the world yet, give it a Sunday or two. They are coming.
And tomorrow morning, the university where I work throws its doors open, and the students pour back in, and a campus that has been dozing all summer wakes up all at once.
The surest sign of all is still a week or two off, but you can feel it building. Soon the Friday night lights will come on over the high school fields, and the whole South will do the thing it does every fall, when a small town’s worth of hope and anticipation and pure spirit rockets straight off the charts under those tall white lights.
That is the thing about our lives, is it not. They are full of seasons.
One minute we are in full summer mode, the travel and the vacations and, if nothing else, a little less traffic on the road of a morning. And the next we are looking up at a slight shift in the air, the magnificent pattern God set spinning a long time ago unfolding once again, right in front of us, the way it always has.
Down here the changing of the seasons is its own kind of event. It means a different feel in the air, the first morning that does not slap you when you step out to the car. It means a change in the look of the whole world, the light coming in at a new angle, the green just starting to think about giving way. And it means that old, familiar, faintly unwelcome sense of time passing on by the way it does, without even the courtesy to ask us whether it should.
But it should. It was made to. And I do not believe I would stop it if I could.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
A porch light keeps the same watch in every season.
It burns the same in August as it does in December. The heat does not dim it and the cold does not brighten it. Everything around it changes, the leaves and the light and the length of the days, and the little light over the door just goes on burning, steady, through every turn of the year.
I have been thinking about seasons this week, the way the summer is quietly handing itself over to the fall. And it strikes me that we are only able to see the change at all because something underneath it does not change.
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” — Genesis 8:22
That is God’s own promise, made a long time ago, that the pattern will hold. Seedtime and harvest. Cold and heat. Summer and winter. Not one of them permanent, and not one of them ever skipped. The seasons turn because He set them turning, and they keep turning because He keeps His word. The very change we feel in the air this week is not chaos. It is faithfulness, dressed up as weather.
I need reminding of that more than I would like to admit. Because I feel the time passing the same as anybody, and if I am honest it can unsettle me, this business of the calendar moving on whether I am ready for it or not. The summer goes. The students come back. The years stack up. And some part of me wants to grab the wheel of it and hold a good season still.
But the seasons were never mine to hold. They were His idea, and they are His promise, and there is a deep rest in that if I will take it. I do not have to hold the year in place. I only have to trust the One who has never once let the seasons fail.
So as the summer closes and the fall comes on, I hope you will feel the change for what it truly is. Not time slipping away from you, but the faithful hand of God turning the page again, the way He always has, the way He always will. The light is on tonight, steady through every season there is, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.