1. ✅Summer Tick Check

Okay, kids. When you come back into the house after playing in the yard, shake out every piece of clothing you’re wearing to check for ticks. Turn it inside out. Hold it up to the light. Look in the mirror. Check every fold of skin. Turn around. Feel with your hands. Clear? Good. Oh, wait! Your hair! Run your fingers methodically through your hair. Cover every inch of your scalp.

Phew! That was close. Nobody wants to catch Lyme Disease!  Nobody wants something hijacking your head. Sticking its spikes into your skin. Infecting you with a dread disease that changes who you are. Sucks the life out of you. Stops you in your tracks. Puts your life on hold.

  1. ✅Summer Skincare Check

Sunscreen on or the trip is off. Down the shore, that sun can really do a number on you. Searing into your skin. Causing you pain. Creating lasting damage. Could lead to cancer, which could be fatal.

  1. Summer Psyche Check

Crickets…

Meantime, that cruel comment from your father bored into your brain and still comes up when the sad sets in. Meanwhile, that thing that happened when you were a child that they said don’t speak of to anyone reverberates in your life decades later. Changes you at the cellular level. But there’s no think-tank studying how to stop it from metastasizing. Only platitudes and placebos: stiff upper lip. Soldier on. 

Worse yet, there are the naysayers. Are you sure that happened? I don’t want to be skeptical but, you were so young. Maybe you were mistaken? 

No. It happened. And the pain you feel is real, but it’s a relic that has calcified into a stumbling block you still trip over.

You can release it. You don’t have to make your mind a mausoleum of dark days.  

You free yourself by excavating and examining said past pain this way:

Did I deserve this? Did I cause this?

No.

Why did no one stop it? Why did no one help me?

I don’t know.

Am I worthy of the good life has to offer? Is my life important?

Yes.

Shake off the debris of memory and walk your mind into the sacred space at the center of your soul.

Check yesterday off your list. Say yes to today.

Let the wounds heal into scars. Let the scars lead you to tend to other people in pain, healing both of you in the process. Don’t resurrect the past now that it’s laid to rest. Don’t give it power over how you feel by poking it and picking at it, revisiting and reviving it in perpetuity. Don’t give old pain new life. Address it fully and release it to make way for new Grace Gifts: joy, peace, love.

Be in this moment. Let tomorrow form into what it will. 

Life is good.

God is good.

All is well.

✅Check.