SUMMER IS HERE!
Summer is my favorite time of year in ministry. I love the packed schedule with camp, mission trips, lunches, Wednesday night activities, girls’ days, and hangouts. But what I love most is the extra time I get to spend with students building relationships and making memories with them because they don’t have school and extracurricular activities dividing their time.
As much as I love the extra time with students, I will admit that I have to make sure I take advantage of the time instead of getting lost in the details of planning or preparing for the next event on our summer calendar. Over the years I have had to grow in being intentional with the time I get with them and even making sure to allow for the organic get-togethers. I am not always good at it and in the past, I would beat myself up over it. But slowly I have learned to let those missed opportunities motivate me to be better at putting my students first in the summer. My desire every summer to be more intentional than the summer before to build relationships and make memories.
Maybe you are like me and can get caught up in the details of summer. So you sometimes miss the opportunity to build relationships. Let me encourage you not to dwell on the opportunities you’ve missed but to learn from them and be more intentional the next time. Let me give you a little tip I have learned in the past couple of years - take a mini-vacation!
One of the things that I have learned in my 10 years of full-time student ministry is that going from wrapping up the school year straight into summer with no break is not a healthy ministry practice. I used to do it all the time at the beginning of my ministry and just take a big vacation in the fall when it was all over. And for a while, that was fine, probably because I was younger and had more energy. But eventually, I found myself becoming exhausted halfway through summer and missed so many opportunities to build relationships because I was just trying to survive summer at that point.
