More than five years into life with our spring-loaded third child, who wakes up (and often wakes us up) at Indy Speedway volume and with Psalm 57:8b urgency[1], we have reached a magical moment: he begs to leave the dinner table to sit in the living room and read silently to himself.
We did not see this quiet coming. Like a lot of kids his age, he’s been interested in reading and being read to for a while, but the sudden zeal caught us off guard. And the magnet that pulls him to that reading chair is the Dog Man series of graphic novels by Dav Pilkey, creator of the Captain Underpants series. With titles like Lord of the Fleas, For Whom the Ball Rolls, and Brawl of the Wild, the Dog Man novels recount the adventures of a hybrid dog/human police officer with a big heart and a penchant for rolling in smelly things. The storylines are absurd and delightful, with a mix of comeuppance and redemption and all-caps hilarity. The books are just fun, period. Dav Pilkey is a genius.
Summer at our house is…a bit of a grab bag. The adults still have work and other commitments, and we try to plan for a balance of downtime and fun things for the kids. Loosed from our school year routines, we ping around from swim lessons to Vacation Bible School, library trips and ice cream runs, ambition to aimlessness. We order ourselves a bit through summer rules so as not to fall into a pit of endless screens and half-finished projects (I’m looking at you, deceptively difficult beaded keychains). The older kids look forward to a week at church camp, and we’ll travel for some family fun most years. We relish eating fresh summer produce and count popsicles as their own food group. But as June tumbles into July, we’ve already ceded the backyard to the mosquitoes. The zinnias grew for a while but seem disinterested in blooming. Inevitably, those perennial summer words come to mind: There’s nothing to do.
What happens when we find ourselves unexpectedly quiet, no longer driven by the school year patterns and obligations? When even the summer momentum stalls out, and we find ourselves in a textbook lull—as every sibling knows, a lull is the perfect precondition for picking a fight.
When given the freedom to fill time, even the grown-ups can struggle with a wide-open agenda and find themselves irritable. I confess to being the kind of desperate creature who craves some structure to keep me sane.
There may be an invitation to receive this less-structured time as rest, for recreation.
Sundays continue to be an anchoring rhythm in our lives. Participating in a church community, seeing and being seen by people we care about, offering something of ourselves in service and in friendship – these are load-bearing structures for our family life. Just as that weekly pattern informs our school year hustle by giving us a centering day to seek absolution and offer our prayers of thanks, now it gives meaning to the meandering days of summer. The odd thing about sabbath time—by which I mean a day of the week whose purpose is re-creating, rest, fellowship, and dwelling in the goodness of God, as opposed to optimizing, accomplishing, laboring, or acquiring—is that it gives intention and meaning to any kind of other days. This pattern of stopping to reflect and to be in community brings energy and clarity to summer days that may lack definition. When we’re in a busier season, sabbath can open up heart and spirit space to help us stay purposeful, not merely productive.
Sabbath becomes something we might look forward to with delight as well as relief; a welcome invitation to meet God and one another and find a guiding rhythm to our days. As the psalmist says, For God alone my soul in silence waits; from God comes my salvation (Psalm 62:1). As the psalmist did not say, Whose dirty socks are on the floor in here?! Family life will have countless loose ends to trim or chase. How good for our souls to remember that God is ready to cherish us right now, not only after all the wet swimsuits are hung up.
I’m thinking about how those brilliantly silly books have emerged as a treat to be savored and looked forward to—how that spring-loaded little boy of mine wants to bounce away from the table to partake of the joys of reading, especially when it’s so rich with comic-style exaggeration. There are subtler jokes too, like the punny titles that play on literary classics, that will be newly funny when he’s old enough to catch those.
I’ll take a page from Dog Man’s book. I wonder if what our summer needs is not a zoomed-in focus on how we spend each day. Instead, we’ll think together about how we can savor our Sundays—let those be protected days for rest, and worship, and family. Let that be the thing that makes us want to leap up and steal away to laugh and savor the gifts being given to us.
[1] “I myself will waken the dawn” Psalm 57:8b
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