What do you do in the Summer Time?

Summer is here and there are lots of great things going on. Marta and I have 7 children and three of them are teenagers. School has been out for a week and already one has gone to EFY or "Especially for Youth" and two others have gone to mountain bike trail building school hosted by IMBA. As a family we went to Salt Lake this past weekend and helped work on a mountain bike trail up Killyon's Canyon. It was nice to work with a dozen or so other people on a trail that had been overused.

Marta and I enjoyed the time in the mountains and took the time to smell the crisp mountian air. We hiked up a mile or so and then went to work for a couple of hours. The area where the trail was diverted was all washed out and cupped. Overall there were about fourteen people clearing brush and smoothing the trail. Chandler (13) was not too impressed with the new trail as it was so smooth you could have ridden a road bike on it, and he want a little more adventure. We enjoyed the time together.

Tonight, Sunday, we had a planning meeting. We all had a lot to contribute to the week. Marta commented that rather than get an overview of the week, we had to plan each hour. Monday, there is basketball camp for the boys, not to mention the plumber and electrician coming over, Scouts on Tuesday, and meetings for the Timberline Camp next week, the two oldest have Youth Conference at the end of the week and Jed (17) has a basketball tournament in Payson, Utah simultaneously with Youth Confrence. As we wiped the sweat off of our forheads after wrinting all of that down, we looked at the next week. It looks pretty much the same. So the crazy not lazy days of summer begin to scream by.

Life is crazy and wonderful, and I am glad to share it with Marta. Marta is truly graceful. I have heard a lot of defintions of grace, but the one I like the best is simple and yet challenging. I define grace as the ability to undertake something, which is very difficult, and make it look simple. Marta does that every week. She accomplishes so much every week with such seeming fluidity that it is mind boggling.

I guess that really we all want to have our own bit of grace somewhere in our lives. We watch Olympians with awe as the they perform amazing feats of strength, agility, stamina, endurance and balance. Deep inside each one of us we watch with the hope that we will find our niche in life where we feel like we have given our Olympic performance. Most likely we have. Probably, our performance is not of physical grace but along the journey we have the opportunity to share our humanity. Along the way we have been there for someone, or are there day after day, making someone elses life little easier, and hopefully better. I am sure most of these act or deed are done when or where few can see or recognize the good deeds, yet they remain, testaments to the goodness and the humanity lies within each of us.

So what is the relationship between grace and the crazy schedules we hold? Well, it is simply this, we continue to drive ourselves, and often our families, in the hope that our children will have opportunies to realize their own greatness; we hope that by providing them with new wholesome situations, that they remain fully alive. As we watch our children grow, we also grow, inside, and our hearts stay young with them. Someday, when they are grown, we continue to live the principles we tried to instill in them, and when the end comes and we graduate from this life, we look back and know we did our best.