Ah. The joy of summer.

It’s vacation time. I confess being one of those who has to check myself when I start to become jealous of my friends travel pictures on social media. What does it mean to envy others’ joy?

Life is so full over the summer break from work and school routines. It seems light, more carefree, especially when you hear the voices of children playing in the yard. What does it mean to smile when others are enduring their first summer without someone they love, enduring a death or divorce or breakup, that has shattered their care-free serenity?

Perhaps we enjoy an overflowing meal cooked on the grill and abounding in laughter with friends, while in the very back of our minds we hear the cries of children who have no lunch or breakfast when school is out.

Everyday is full of contrasts like these.

The only answer any one of us can give comes from our own experience of divine love and goodness. I do not know how God might bring love and goodness to someone who is suffering. I can only know how God met me in my own. I then have two helpful options (at least). I can be the bringer of hope as God has been for me, or I can empathize and share the moments of hopelessness to dispel the loneliness felt in God’s apparent absence.

A Contrast Embodied

Imagine that you are God’s contrasting evidence to the belief that life is nothing but fleeting moments of captured joy and selfishly-retrieved prosperity. You are the evidence, in this amazing world you inhabit, that there is a God who loves and cares for others. You may never know who tells the story of your kindness and declares, “that was the day I knew God had not left me alone.”

So, whatever today may bring, let this be a day the Lord has made! Rejoice and be glad in it!