Written by: Rev. Amber Tremblett

When I was in high school, my friends and I would make summer bucket lists every June.

They would include all the fun things we wanted to do together during the summer months. Things like sleepovers and beach days, weekend camping trips, and trips to water and adventure parks. We’d include ice cream dates and late-night pizza deliveries, barbeques and ATV rides.

By the time school came around again, most of our bucket list items would remain untouched. There just wasn’t enough time. More accurately, though, we would lament that we spent too much time lying on the trampoline or sleeping in. And we’d vow that next year would be different. That this was the last summer we’d waste. You only live once, after all.

I’d love to say I’ve learned since high school, but the same pressure that plagued us back then still rules me now. The pressure to curate an extravagant summer that takes advantage of its beauty, but ends up monopolizing my time and destroying my peace.

Our culture tells us not to “waste time.” Whether that be because we need to constantly produce something or because our time with our loved ones is short, there is a sense that time is precious, so we must make it count.

In a way, this understanding of culture resonates. Time is precious. But where culture comes up against our Christian faith is in what it considers a good use of time.

Culture seems to condemn the simple in favour of the complicated, to dismiss a slow pace in favour of something fast and furious. It is hardest to ignore the call of culture in the summer time because these summer months are when life slows down, when we have more “free time,” and the pressure to make something of it increases tenfold.

So we create summer bucket lists, and plan outings and play dates. We get frustrated when our faith communities want to slow down in the summer because “God’s work never stops!” We are determined to make the most of our downtime even when that means forgoing downtime altogether.

If we have the energy and the desire to enter our summers in this way, that’s great! But I know so many of us feel the pressure to overschedule, overstimulate, and overcomplicate at the expense of our need to rest and renew.

And when we do, our own lives become a distraction from living in the presence of God. Our attempts to fill each day with purpose get in the way of our true purpose in Christ. I’m not convinced this is The Way.

So what do we do instead?

The gospel is actually quite simple. In Matthew 22:34-40 (NRSV), the Pharisees try to make a fool of Jesus by asking him what they think will be a complicated question about the law. They ask: “teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Jesus’s response distills scripture into two simple principles: “‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

Jesus lays out quite clearly for us what our intention for each day should be:

Love God.

Love our neighbour.

This intention is the same regardless of free time and nice weather.

It endures through every season and is the guiding principle behind every plan. It is the simple truth that encapsulates God’s extravagant love. These two simple commands are our eternal purpose.

Which means the purpose of our lives isn’t to maximize and optimize our time.

When we enter each day with this sort of intention we end up creating unrealistic expectations and goals for our time that only serve to complicate our schedules, and our relationships–with the people in our lives and with God.

What would happen if we changed the metric we used to measure whether our summer was successful? Instead of feeling guilty for not filling every waking minute with another experience, what if the only questions we asked to determine whether our days had value–the only items on our summer bucket list–were “Did I love God?” And “did I love my neighbour?”

If we spend the hot days of summer with these commandments as our only goals, then we relieve ourselves of the pressure of adding purpose to our lives.

As human beings created by God, our purpose is built in. We do not need to find it, expand it, or overcomplicate it. Our purpose is always to reflect the image of God through love.

We do not need to feel guilty about the lack of extravagance in our days because extravagance has never been the point.

The point, like the gospel, is simple and clear: seek God in every moment no matter how simple, no matter how small.

Sitting on the front porch on a nice evening can be just as meaningful as doing the same thing at the local park with the spectacular view. Cooking and enjoying a meal at home is just as special as going to a nice restaurant. God is just as present at regular Sunday service as he would have been at the special summer prayer retreat that nobody wanted to commit to.

This summer, I challenge you to rip up the bucket list. Rip it up and throw it away, along with the pressure to maximize and optimize.

Make a new list instead, one that embraces simplicity. One that contains the only things we actually need to do as people of God:

Love God. Love Neighbour.

Luckily, these bucket list items can be done in the simplest of ways, in the simplest of places.

If we do them, we have lived faithfully.

And a life lived faithfully is never a waste of time.