You Know What I Did Last Summer?

 Summer of 2024...

There's been a lot of Deja vu this summer.

Some of it includes the good kind of reruns. Much like binge watching our favorite Office or Parks and Recs episodes, it's comfort food for the soul. 

Some of these reruns are somewhat ordinary. More time with friends, or at the city pool, the gym, or the movies. Spending time playing with baby cousins, and eating watermelon, cherries, and grilled burgers. Fun books instead of school reading. Later nights and slower mornings.

One of our newer reruns has been Moses' involvement in the Red Mountain theater camp. Not only does he love it, but he performs alongside my early childhood bestie's daughter, and Dan's junior high/high school bestie's daughter, making it such a full-circle experience for us. This year he performed in "School House Rock, Jr." for which we filled two rows up with our biological family AND our church family. What a testimony to the love we all share!

Dan and I enjoyed our usual staycation, mixing it up just a tiny bit to visit a lesser-known hotel in Fountain Hills called Adero. The view was breathtaking, the pool quiet and the laughter over dinner at sunset, priceless.

Dan's summer has come to include a week at "Bob's Camp" aka Rip'd 4 Life. Our friend, Bob, has a ministry to young men, and his group takes a group of teenage boys up to camp to do lots of high testosterone things together, while also growing in the Lord, and learning about emotional maturity, self-control, and adulting. They typically help with one of the building or upkeep projects at Pinerock and take pride in their work. They go hiking, fishing or kayaking, and a load of other stuff. They take turns cooking dinner, and apparently my kid who doesn't eat my salmon (or many veggies) was part of the team that chose to cook up some salmon, broccoli and diced potatoes and declared it very good.

These Williams' family summer reruns always include some of the things we've grown to love best, like spending time up at Pinerock leading the nursery-preschool program for our district camp meeting. 

My children's pastor, Frankie, brought me up to Pinerock for the first time when I was in 5th grade Caravans. It was also the first time I saw snow falling! And Frankie's still up there every year at Camp Meeting co-leading the 1st-6th grade program, and spending time with her kids and grandkids.

One of the most memorable trips to there was as a 7th grader. My youth pastor, Rich, knelt with me at the alter as I prayed to ask Jesus to fill my heart. And Rev. Rich is now one of the camp directors and I get to give him a hug and hear him say he's proud of me, every time we come.

We've been bringing our kids up since Daniel was a baby, almost every year, and have been involved with staffing preschool 4-5 times now (I believe our team started in 2016 and we all took a year off in 2020 and my friend Pearl carried on with he team in 2021 while I went to Colorado). We've watched kids we see once a year move on up through infants, preschool and now leaving us for the elementary school class. The kids we bring with us get bigger and bigger and much more effective at helping out. Daniel, Moses, and John had an actual fan club by the end of the week.

Then (2019?)

And now!

There never fails to be some small or big catastrophe attached to the week...whether it's the year Daniel broke his arm, or Tom ended up in the hospital for over a month with a serious medical condition and the rest of us came home with the ronas...it's like childbirth and we always seem to forget by the next year. Maybe because the good memories outweigh the sum total of the bad ones.

Which leads me to some of the "traditions" that are much less ideal, and I'd love to lose. Like a reboot of a show that you didn't even like the first time.

In many ways I feel like we're living in a reboot of 2020/2021. Or the Twilight Zone. And I don't love that for us. We're watching the same two presidential candidates fight it out like second graders. Just like summer of 2020. I'm starting to have to press the "Snooze for 30 Days" button on social media for people I normally really like, because their sharing of memes don't really fit the character I believe they're capable of.   And I want to keep believing that. It's crazy hot here and I'm sur ethat doesn't help. And, stupid COVID is doing it's wave again, like it seems to do around our house at this exact same time almost every year. This time it finally got Mo. For the first time. He's alright, but we were REALLY proud of his four year long negative test streak and now we have to hang up on the dream of being the last surviving COVID free human. 

I've been fighting the usual blah's that I tend to get towards the end of summer, when so many things I prepared for have come and gone, when time is ticking on one of the "last summers of my kids' childhood" (stupid Disney commercials), and it's STILL hot, with no end in sight. 

But not everything is grand reruns or lousy reboots. There's been some beautiful remixes thrown in there. Like when Jars of Clay did the remixed hymns album in 2005. When something old and beautiful becomes (arguably) even more beautiful. 

For the last 4 years I've watched Hamilton around or on the 4th of July. On my television thanks to Disney plus. Usually I'm folding laundry and I have to pause it so someone can tell me a story of something that happened in a video game. This year? WE WERE IN THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED! All four of us attended the live performance at Hamilton and it LIVED UP! So worth the wait.

I know I talked about this in my last post, so feel free to scroll on by if you need to, but almost every summer Daniel attends Elev8 at Point Loma Nazarene University with the Journey of Grace Youth Group, but THIS year, Moses and I and a handful of kids from The Table joined in. I was sent body surfing through Brown chapel and that feels like a bad dream. But I was dropped four times and still didn't wake up so I guess it was real. Our kids competed in sports and musical competitions, and we spent time on the beach, and got to be in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, San Diego. We saw the Lord work to grow us as adult and teen leaders through our time together, doing his will through all the ups and downs of mixing three different church groups into one. 

And, for those of you who read my previous post about food allergy worries...Moses ate WELL, and the head chef and his team at Point Loma get 6 out of 5 stars from this allergy mama :-). 

Summers when I was growing up (pre streaming television) were a time for reruns on our 5-10 stations. But they've also been a time for new releases at the theater, and this year had some newly released blockbusters as well (if we still call them blockbusters now that there's no Blockbusters?).

For one, as I mentioned last post as well, my friends, Pearl and Robyn, talked me into my first camping trip in over 20 years. I used to camp when I was little and I liked some things about it then. But I was terrified of bees and get cranky when it's hot, and don't get me started on smelly out houses. And the last time I went camping (with Dan, Doug and Erin), we couldn't find the college group we were going up with until after midnight, it poured down rain all night, I didn't sleep one bit because I was cold and the next morning at daybreak we packed up in the mud and went home. 

But Pearl and Robyn were just not buying any of my excuses. They did a great job of trying to redeem the experience, letting me borrow a cot AND an air mattress, playing Oregon Trail the card game until we couldn't keep our eyes open and roasting Reese's peanut butter cup s'mores. Unfortunately, I hadn't regained my voice from the previous weekend. And there were signs in the bathroom educating us on what to do in the seemingly inevitable event of a bear attack. And I'm over 40 now and have to go pee at almost exactly 2 a.m. every single night. But there's very few people that make this kind of thing bearable (pun intended) and these two are those girls.

Another "new release" this year was that Dan had a surgery that disqualified him from any lifting at work for six weeks. And his job is dependent on ability to lift. SO, we've had him around a good chunk of the summer, and I have to say I love it. We're more relaxed and settling into a slower, less stressful pace that I can't say I hate. It's too bad we're a ways from retirement, but I'm savoring these last couple of weeks before returning to work.

We're also hoping to take the kids up the coast to a Giant's game in San Fran next week, Lord willing, if we are all reasonably healthy. I am looking forward to that post.

If there's one big lesson I've learned it is that we need a little bit of all of this in our lives. The old traditions ground us, and help us mark how far we've come. And we don't have to see that as boring. Remixed traditions keep us fresh, and keep our kids both rooted and reaching. And new things are an opportunity to embrace a gift, trust our creator and grow into the potential that's been laid. Newness doesn't mean that the old was bad. Or unimportant. In fact, it's usually a result of what we've gained from the past. And those re-occurring problems? Maybe we didn't learn what we needed to from them the first time.  But, I think the happiest people are those who can be content in a mixture of all three.