For Everything There Is A Season....

I am quickly updating tonight, because summer is flying away, faster than I could have every planned.

It is a season I always look forward to, and at the same time can’t wait to see end. Houston summers are sticky and hot, and warrant a paragraph all their own. Somehow I have managed to secure quite a tan, and hair that has grown to a length that can only be controlled in this humidity by being scraped into a ponytail until cooler weather arrives.

Life has just rolled along. I am working four days a week now, pulling 10 hour shifts on good days, 12 hour shifts on the bad. It is a good a schedule, but leaves me quivering with exhaustion by Friday night. I roll out of bed somewhere around 5:30 a.m on the weekdays and am nursing a Starbucks coffee in my office before 7:00 in the morning. I can never guess what will happen between the hours of 7:00 a.m and 6:00 p.m so I no longer try. I just count the blessings as such, try hard to see value in what I can, and let the rest just be. Weekends are spent jetting from this place to that place. I am NEVER home. I literally unpack my suitcase only to wash, repack, and take off again. I jokingly remarked to a friend this weekend that “I work in Houston. I don’t live anywhere right now.” And so, it’s true.

God has been strongly impressing upon my heart this summer that “for everything there is a season.” Just as summer will come and go, so will this part of my life. This season has been sweet in so many ways, yet I am so anxious for (and about!) the next ones arrival.

Last week a colleague of mine brought her precious five week old daughter up to work to visit. (I couldn’t believe she would think to bring a newborn into our nasty hospital but that is another story!) I would never have asked to hold her baby, but as she scooped up and then handed that 7 lb bundle to me, I swear I thought the whole room would hear my biological clock screaming “tick, tock, tick, tock.”

For several blissful moments that baby snuggled on my chest while I imagined what that season of my life would feel like someday. I think I’ve had “baby” on the brain because so many of my friends have recently announced they are expecting. I joyfully relished in visions of pink bows, diapers, and the smell of baby powder, until I was interrupted by a pager vibrating on my hip, my phone simultaneously ringing, and the charge nurse arriving to inform me that a psychosocial nightmare of a family had just been admitted down the hall, and could I “please go work some magic? Like.... now?"

Ahhh......Bliss never lasts for long.

We wait all year for suntans, shorts, and swimming pools.

And then we complain about the heat and eagerly count the days until the season changes.

And as sure as I am that summer will end this year, I am just as certain that this season of my life will (eventually) draw to a close too.

To everything there is a season,

a time for every matter under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die;

a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

a time to kill and a time to heal ...

a time to weep and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn and a time to dance ...

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to lose and a time to seek;

a time to rend and a time to sew;

a time to keep silent and a time to speak;

a time to love and a time to hate;

a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Love,
Jules