As I write this, it is the evening of July 31st, the year does not matter for come this date every year there is sadness. The sadness is caused by the day slipping into night. It is as if a curtain is coming down on the play that we call summer. For you see today is the unofficial end to the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Days that are filled with nothingness, nothingness that crates a joy that comes from just enjoying the season. This joy comes from getting up and deciding just what you want to for this day and this day only. There is no future, there is no past, there is just this day that stretches out before you. If you are a kid, you think of kid stuff, playing, swimming, shooting hoops. If you are a stay at home parent, your only concern is getting through the day without going crazy. You are not worried about tomorrow; all you want is just to get through this day. If you are a working parent, all you desire is getting your kid through the day. So you fill it up with day care, or camp or Vacation Bible School. Remember the old adage that there are no atheists in fox holes. Well during the summer there are not atheists in neighborhoods. Keeping your child busy is all that matters, he or she may be a Baptist this week and a Methodist next week.
But alas, all that ends when daylight returns to the earth on the first of August. For it is on this day when you awake, no matter what your age and realize that you have survived another summer for school will be starting soon. Now more than a time or two in your day, you will think of school. For the child, his or her mind begins to wonder who they will have in class. Will they like their teacher? If they are older, in the next couple of days they will receive a letter telling them how best they can prepare for whatever fall sport they are in. So a part of their day will be filled with getting in shape for the August practices. Parents start looking at back to school ads in newspapers. They wonder about what they should budget for clothes. They begin to inquire of their children if they remember what they did with the class supplies list for the coming year. For the rest of August all that will be done or thought of. will point in some way to the start of school. For the Church what that means all those kids who came to Vacation Bible School are nothing more than a memory. "You say you want me to have my child there at what time?" That same Church that helped that parent get through the long summer day is now regulated to a memory, kind of like the hot weather we never had, or the Mariners being only a game and a half out of first place in early July. After all, my child has soccer on Sunday morning, or that is our family time when we all sit down to a big breakfast and watch Football.
Yes the lazy, hazy, crazy, nothing days of summer are gone for another year. May they rest in peace.
