September 22, 2016
I titled my last post “Summer Wrap Up: Part 1” in high hopes of having a few more posts about lessons I learned over the summer. That post was all about being careful when assigning names to things, especially ourselves, because names stick. I’m going to go back and read it again because apparently I kinda didn’t learn my lesson. Because you see, when you type up a blog post and hit that publish button, the title (or name) is stuck. And when something is named “Part 1” there needs to be a “Part 2.” Except in my case, parts 2 and 3 were only in my head, not yet on the computer. And before I knew it, time had passed and I was left staring at the calendar labeled with the words, “First Day of Autumn.” And the summer wrap ups, well, weren’t wrapped up.
So here goes a brief and hurried wrap up of summer (on the first day of fall.)
Lesson number two focused on a fact that has been real to me for some time: Life’s simple things are often the sweetest.
We paid a quick visit to the farmer’s market on most summer Saturday mornings. At one stand, I picked up a recipe card for grilled peaches. So easy and so delicious.
Try it sometime. Cut peaches in half and remove pit. Drizzle each half with honey and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Grill for about three minutes on each side.
Simple and sweet.
My final lesson wasn’t simple and it wasn’t sweet. It was downright stressful.
On the drive home from a week-long vacation, it hit me. I had left my tablet….the one with all of my writing and blog info in the vacation cabin. Of course, I realized this three hours into the drive home. Too far to go back and retrieve it. I spent several hours on the phone with housekeeping, management, and FedEx. Beyond stressful.
It wasn’t so much the tablet itself, it was the writing. That was something that I couldn’t replace. But the kicker was really that we are checkers.
You know what I mean? We check hotels, cabins, wherever we stay overnight to ensure we don’t leave anything. We check the drawers and closets. We check under the beds and on top of the fridge. We’ve even taught our kids to be checkers. And we missed it. We all did.
We had hidden the tablet under a nightstand. I don’t know why exactly. But that’s where we hid it and that’s where we left it. Hidden treasure.
Let me skip ahead. I got the tablet back. Several weeks later. Plenty of worrying involved. Sent to the wrong post office. But I got it back.
But the line that kept coming to mind was “Don’t hide your treasure.”
I’m not advocating leaving your doors unlocked or being all rebellious and disobeying those parking garage signs telling you to remove valuables from sight.
I’m talking about real treasure. The stuff that matters. Time well spent. Loving others. Serving the Lord.
Those things get so easily hidden. Tucked down under the nightstands while we put a light and emphasis on the temporal and fleeting events and pressures of the day. What gifts and talents have we stuck in the crevices of our schedules so we can check off another to-do list of busyness? How many relationships die out while we struggle to keep up with the Joneses?
I have a lot of checking to do. My time. My attitude. My heart. I don’t want to miss the treasures.
“But store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven…” Matthew 6:20