Duke Kwon is an associate pastor at Grace DC, a PCA church in Washington, DC.
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I wonder if the summertime is when we’re at our most human. Life’s obligations—including work, groceries, diapers, and bills—carry on as usual. But during these longer, warmer days, at least more so than other times of the year, we give ourselves permission to acknowledge, even celebrate, our human limits. We “vacate” our schedules for extended periods of rest and recreation. We travel, allowing colleagues to cover for us or function without us—an event that liberates us from the illusion of indispensability. We dust off our old tennis rackets, seeking to master that elusive backhand. We dust off our imaginations, making and mastering fresh summer reading lists. Awakened from our fluorescent light-induced slumber, we play under the sun as giddy admirers of God’s creation. We are never more like our children—as delighted as they are in a popsicle or the chance to run through the sprinklers. And Jesus had a few glowing things to say about those little ones.

 One of the hardest things to learn is the art of settling into our own skin. We’ve never been good at it. Wasn’t it the prospect of a life without limits and needs—“You shall be like God,” cooed the serpent—that so charmed Adam and Eve? The promise turned out to be a fraud, but the appetite for what it offered rages on. Most of the year we willingly, if tragically, subject ourselves to a mode of life that is superhuman—indeed, grotesquely inhuman—where the need for “rest” is resisted as an emblem of weakness, where leisure is nudged towards life’s margins, where creativity and imagination, two great “birthmarks” of God’s image-bearers, are rubbed out.

 But grace begins to re-humanize us. The God who created us also provides a Better Adam—“You shall be a Man,” pledged the Father with the Son before time began—and refurbishes us in the likeness of the truly human one. This process entails learning to embrace being deeply dependent, body and soul, upon the restorative grace of Jesus. It means understanding that we are creatures designed for leisure, creativity, and rest. Wonderfully self-insufficient. Gloriously human.

 The summer seems to reconnect us with this reality—this identity—like nothing else. We become strangely free to be what we normally resist. To be sure, the ultimate key to this re-humanizing project is God’s Son, not summer. But it does give us a temporary taste of what could be. Must it come to an end with the shortening of the days? What would life be like if we extended this holy seasonal impulse into the winter and beyond? Who knows? We might find ourselves becoming profoundly more human, tennis racket in hand.