The Sunday Letter
It is September, and I am honestly not sure how that happened.
A couple of weeks back I wrote to you about the first hint of the turn, that little edge in the morning air that shows up down here before the calendar is willing to admit anything. Back then it was mostly a feeling. A rumor. Something you had to be paying attention to even catch. Well, it is not a rumor anymore. Fall has arrived in earnest, and it did not knock first.
The signs are everywhere now. The Friday night lights are burning over the high school fields, and by Wednesday the whole town is already leaning toward the game. The children are not easing into the school year anymore, they are deep in it, loaded down with the schedules and the practices and the projects, the full fall machinery running at speed. And any morning now the air is going to do the thing we have all been waiting for, that first real crispness that makes you stand on the porch a few seconds longer than you meant to.
I will be honest with you about my own week. I have been a little overwhelmed by it. Not by anything wrong. Just by the speed of it. Somewhere in the last few days it landed on me that it is already September, and September is not a quiet month to arrive at. September is the month you look up and realize the whole back half of the year is bearing down on you at once.
Because it is not just fall that has arrived. It is everything behind fall. Thanksgiving is closer than it feels. Christmas is right behind it. And I am the kind of person who cannot help but start running the whole thing in my head early, the who-goes-where of the holidays, the what-are-we-doing, the ideas I want to get right this year, the fall trips and the fall projects and the fall Sundays I keep meaning to plan for and have not yet. It is a lot to look up and see all at once, standing there in the first week of September with a whistle blowing on a practice field somewhere down the street.
But here is what I have had to keep telling myself this week, and I will pass it along to you for whatever it is worth. The season is not an emergency. It is a gift. The whole point of a Southern fall is not to get through it, but to be in it. The games. The crisp mornings. The table getting fuller and louder as the year goes on. If I plan the thing so hard and so far ahead that I forget to actually walk out on the porch and feel the air finally change, then I have missed the very thing I was making all the lists for.
So that is my small reminder to myself, and you are welcome to it. Yes, it is September. Yes, it is all coming fast, the football and the school and the holidays stacked up behind them. Go on and make your lists. Then look up. Fall is here, the real thing this time. Try not to plan it so well that you forget to live in it.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
A lighthouse was never lit for its own sake. A light that shines only on the keeper is no light at all. The whole point of it is outward, thrown across the dark water, for somebody else to steer by. It does its work only when it is seen.
I have been thinking this week about being a light, and I will tell you, the idea makes a man like me a little uncomfortable. It sounds like something you would put on a poster. It sounds like it is about being impressive, and I am not much interested in being impressive, and I am suspicious of people who are. But that is not what the words actually say, once you slow down and read them.
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” — Matthew 5:14-16
Notice He does not say become a light, or work up a light, or go be impressive. He says you are one. Already. The only question is whether you will keep it where it can be seen, up on the stand, or hide it under a basket where it warms nobody. And notice where the light finally points. Not back at you. The whole thing ends with people giving glory to God, not to the one holding the lamp. The lighthouse keeper’s name is not painted on the water. The light was never about him. It was only ever for the boats.
I will be honest about my own basket. I have hidden my light plenty, out of fear of what people would think, out of plain laziness, out of a quiet notion that keeping to myself was the humble thing to do. It is not. Hiding a light that could have brought somebody home is not humility. It is just a lamp under a basket, and a basket does not need the light and the dark water does.
So this week, wherever you are, let the thing shine. Not to be seen yourself, but so that somebody out in the dark can see by it and find the way. You do not have to be a great beacon. You only have to not hide. The light is on tonight, up on its stand, thrown out across the black water for anybody trying to find their way home, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.