Noticing a Good Summer While You're Still In It: ‘‘When Thou Hast Eaten and Art Full’’

‘‘When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.’’ — Deuteronomy 8:10

© Joanna Colomas Magazine

The watermelon is gone within twenty minutes, and every chin at the table is sticky with it. Someone has left a trail of wet footprints from the pool to the kitchen door that no one has any real interest in wiping up yet. The light at six o'clock is doing the thing it only does in July: gold, low, catching the dust in the air like it's worth photographing, though you don't reach for your phone, because you are standing in the middle of it, not outside it looking in. Somebody is laughing so hard at something you didn't even hear that they can't get the rest of the sentence out. This is, by any honest measure, a good day. And you know it while it's happening, which is rarer than it sounds.

Because most days aren't caught like this. Most of what is good about a life gets recognized afterward — in a photograph, in a story told at Christmas, in the sudden ache of missing something you didn't know you'd stop having. But this one you're catching live. The watermelon, the footprints, the gold light, the laugh. This is the summer you awaited, and prayed for.

© Joanna Colomas Magazine

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Remembering It While You're Still In It

© Joanna Colomas Magazine

There's an old instruction, tucked into a book about a people who had just been given a good land after a long time of having very little:

"When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee" — Deuteronomy 8:10

Not when the land runs dry and you miss it. Not looking back on it, later, from somewhere harder. When you have eaten, when you are full, bless Him then — while your stomach is still satisfied and the goodness is still on your tongue, before it has any chance to turn into nostalgia.

It is a strange thing to have to be told to give thanks for a gift while you're still holding it. You'd think gladness would announce itself, that a good day would be received as good, no instruction needed. But gladness is slippery. It moves through a life at the same speed the life is moving, and it is entirely possible to live inside a genuinely happy stretch of years and only recognize it was one once it's over. Once the pool towels are only taken out for swimming class, once the light goes early again, once you're the one telling the story about the summer the watermelon disappeared in twenty minutes flat.

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Every Good Gift

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights" — James 1:17

© Joanna Colomas Magazine

The watermelon and the wet footprints and the six o'clock light are not accidents of a good week or a lucky year. They are gifts, specifically given, from a Father who is, the same verse says, unchanging, not moody, not generous only after the hard seasons and stingy in between. He is, constantly and without variation, the kind of Father who gives good things. This particular July, with its particular laughter, came from His hand. It is worth naming it as such, out loud, while you still have it.

So here is one small thing, if you want it: not to fix anything, because nothing here needs fixing, but to keep this day from slipping past unmarked the way so many good ones do. Tonight, at the table, or at bedtime, or in the car with the windows down, say one true and specific thing out loud: not "today was fun," but the actual thing — the watermelon, the laugh, the light on the water.
Let the children hear you name it. Let them learn, by watching you do it, that a good day is worth stopping to notice before it becomes only a memory of one.

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This Is the Day

"This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it" — Psalm 118:24

© Joanna Colomas Magazine

Not the day we will be grateful for eventually, once it has safely become the past. This day. The sticky fingers down to the elbows, and the wet floor, and the chlorine sent on our hair, and the light doing its one impossible thing over the water. Rejoice in it now, while it's still today, while the watermelon is still half-eaten on the counter and somebody is still laughing in the next room at something you're about to go ask them to repeat, because you want to hear it too.

You did not miss it. You are standing right in the middle of it. This is the day.

© Joanna Colomas Magazine

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