There's a well-worn idea about how things change — that before something new can emerge, something first has to end. There's the ending, then a messy middle where nothing seems to be happening, and then — something new. It's the caterpillar's story. It's the cocoon. It's the butterfly that was always becoming, even when it looked like nothing was happening at all.


We tend to tell that story in winter. It makes sense when the trees are bare and the world looks stripped down. Endings feel right in the cold. But I've been thinking lately about what that same story looks like when everything outside is green and full and the flowers are in full show — and I think it looks a lot like this.


Summer has its own kind of endings. Kids finish a school year. A chapter closes. Something is left behind. But these endings don't feel like loss — they feel like launching pads. There's rest ahead, and family time, and vacations, and the particular anticipation that belongs to summer alone. You can feel it in the air. Something great is about to happen, even if you can't name it yet.


I got a small taste of that recently. I went to visit my grandfather — 96 years old and still surprising me. While I was there, I brought my dad along. He and my grandfather (his former Father-in-Law) hadn't seen each other in twenty-six years. It wasn't complicated or heavy. It was just two people glad to be in the same room, on a Tuesday afternoon, because the timing finally worked out. I'm not sure I could have planned it. I'm not sure I needed to. Sometimes God simply arranges things and all you have to do is show up.


That feels like summer to me. Not every good thing requires a dramatic setup. Some of it is just God showing off — painting creation green and gold, filling the trees back up, and quietly putting the right people in the same room at the right time.


I see it in our community too. Gatherings may be a little lighter right now — vacations, travel, life. But when we do come together, there's a happiness to it. We're working, yes — planning for fall walks, thinking through changes we want to make, trying to build something better. But it doesn't feel like grinding. It feels like tending. Like we're in the cocoon, and something good is quietly becoming.


The prophet Isaiah writes: "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19). Don't miss it this summer. Look outside. Look at the people around you. Pay attention to the Tuesdays. God is at work — even now, especially now — and it's a beautiful thing to watch.

De Colores,


Jason Hill