Summer.

Summers are weird.

In the past I've had a hard time transitioning from summers to school years and back. And from long winter breaks to school years as well. I think it kind of messes with my sense of reality; rather than time simply passing, it's more like I'm going from one world to another.

I used to always think similarly of weekends; that it was simply a break from reality. Like, weekends were there just to fool you into thinking that you have time to relax and do your own stuff, but once that Monday hits, you gotta hit the ground running, whether it be school or work or whatever. (I guess this varies depending on what you're doing at the present time, but you get the idea).

Often, in ways, when I think about Japan, it also seems like a different world. And in many ways it is, but in many ways, it isn't. And I'd like to think about the ways that it is.

Because mostly, what we did there, what I did there, might be a life-style that we should consider everywhere. In everything we did, the focus was clear: to do everything in our power to love people how God loved us. Every day we would wake up with prayer and worship, asking God to do mighty things each day, and every day we would end by thanking Him for everything that he is and everything that he's done. We took correction earnestly, we did everything we can to humble ourselves, to become servants every moment of the day.

And yet it seems like there are so many more barriers to this throughout the year. We go to school, we work, we have more obligations, our time is split up among different people, we become distracted... but through all of these things, our focus should be the same. Yet too often, it isn't. Too often, my summers, my retreats, my spiritual highs, become breaks from reality. I feel like they something along the lines of... bringing me back to reality, instead.

I think as humans, it's easy to leave things behind and settle into the patterns that we're used to. After "life-changing" experiences, we feel different; but we don't know how to bring that back to the "real world". I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for this. Maybe our idea of what our life will look like is so narrow minded that we cannot change how we live without changing how we view life itself. Because life goes beyond seasons, beyond ups and downs...

Hopefully I can really start stringing everything together.

Life is funny.