First Spiritual Thursday

This is the first Thursday in June, so the Spiritual Journey Thursday gang meets to think about a variety of topics and how it affects their spiritual life.  This month's topic is Summer.  I tried thinking about this a few times over the past week and a half and nothing really came together in my brain well.  I didn't seem to get a lot of minutes all in one sitting to really meditate upon the theme.  Then I looked up Bible verses with summer in them.  And that is when I began to be able to focus better.

Summer is a promise from God.
Genesis 8:22  While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

This constancy is promised.  We can count on the cycles of seasons and day and night and that summer will return in an orderly fashion.  We don’t get tricked into spring turning to winter, and then autumn leading into summer.  There are not days without a night between (though at the poles they might be a bit shorter or longer than on other places on Earth…).  God gave us the promise of summer as part of a cycle for as long as the earth keeps spinning and rotating around the sun.

Of the four seasons, summer seems to me to be the one that most resembles Heaven....perpetual summer...though without the humidity, of course.  As beautiful looking as winter can be, it is not “heavenly” or “heaven-sent” to me.  It’s a dormant, cold time, when most things at least appear to be dead... unless you like skiing or other winter sports...
Spring is new birth, and autumn is the harvest before the cold, dormant dead of winter sets in.  Summer is the realized potential of all living things -  which seems heaven-like.  Everything is awake, grown or growing, green or greening, and flourishing.

Summer is our promise,
and our warning to harvest and prepare for the promised winter.

Summer

When the butterflies

fly home,
And moths
no longer roam,
Snowflakes spritely 

take their place

upon my face.
Memories of warm

sun spun

as lace
I hold dear today.

For soon I fear

the silvered sands
of beach

between my toes

will slip away
And ocean’s white-capped
waves

will be replaced 

with towering drifts -

the rift between
Summer’s reason
and
Winter’s treason.
As waves sift footprints
from the sand,
So may the sun

release iced land.

And someday I will

come to know

The endlessness of

 summer's glow.

by Donna JT Smith, 2018

Check out the links at Margaret Simon's Reflections on the Teche for more Summer postings.