Summers and the Spiritual Life

We are in the throes of summer—hot, humid days, even sultry at times and broken on occasion by a very welcomed rain shower. Vacations, weekend excursions, family gatherings, recreation—all of these become part of the summer landscape.  Remember the old Sam Cooke song:  Summertime, and the living is easy. Fish are jumping and the cotton is high… I’ve noticed a few things over the years about summers in church life.  Allow me to share them with you.

First of all, for many people, the spiritual life takes a vacation along with the family, the kids, and the dog.  The casual nature of summer spills over into one’s submission to Jesus Christ.  The  result?  The spiritual life is often treated as casually as a splash in the pool.  Carefree become “don’t really care about spiritual matters either.” 

There was an old Seinfeld episode in which George Kanstanza loses his job right before the summer months begin.  He declares his time of unemployment as “the summer of George.”  You see many Jesus-followers declare their summer as the “summer of Sean” or the “summer of Jessica.”  Casual and carefree become neglect, self-serving, irresponsible, and unencumbered where the Jesus-life is concerned. 

It isn’t just about missing a few Sundays of church.  Church attendance is not the fix-all for one’s spiritual growth and spiritual formation.  But people begin to treat the whole of their spiritual life the same way as they do their worship attendance—ignored and neglected, if not entirely abandoned.

The end of the summer is when we begin to hear things like, “Have you seen Sean and Jessica lately, they’ve all but dropped out of church,” or “I hear they’ve started attending another church.”

From Sean and Jessica you hear things like, “We were out for six weeks and nobody even missed us.”  This may or may not be true but this becomes an excuse or rather a justification for their spiritual laxity.  It’s easier to blame someone else than it is to look inward at our own shortcomings. 

What has really happened to Sean and Jessica?  One thing as already noted is that they try to overcome their guilt by shifting the blame to others.  There was a little problem with someone at church—they didn’t like the preacher or the music or their Sunday School teacher—and being away just allowed that dissatisfaction to grow.  Another thing is that by starting over fresh in another church they can continue to treat their spirituality casually because the new congregation will have low expectations of them from the beginning and they can continue to coast and drift. 

The truth is that we cannot neglect our spiritual formation without being steered on the wrong course in our spiritual journey.  Let me suggest a few things we can do to correct the course:

Never treat your spirituality casually.  It’s never too late to turn so begin your turning now, before you drift further off course.
Go ahead and swallow your pride and come back in to the fellowship you’ve abandoned over the summer.  Get involved in serving in a ministry or in a small group.
Have you observed others who begun this drift in a sea of casualness?  Give them a call or send them an e-mail.  Wouldn’t you want someone to reach out to you if you were drifting? 

Listen to the closing words of that old “Summertime” song:

One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing
You're gonna spread your wings and reach for the sky.