On staying cool and being cool

I live in a place where it is always pretty hot in the summer, but this summer is exceptional. It is not hot. Not merely hot. It is dang hot. The difference between hot and dang hot is that when it is hot, you want a cold drink, you want air conditioning, you want to go swimming. When it is dang hot, you just want to die.

I have a friend from Kentucky who told me a log time ago (and regrets telling me, because I quote her every summer and attribute it to her) that when asked how hot it is, back home they say, "It's hotter than a firecracker stuck up a dragon's *butt* on the fourth of July in *hades*. We have changed that this week to say it is now hotter than a firecracker stuck up a dragon's butt on the fourth of July in a volcano on the sun. Which entirely accurate, but it is how we feel.

Now, I am an unregistered member of the polar bear club. I love swimming so much that I will swim in Lake Michigan in May in the 50's. I will get into a snow fed mountain stream that literally makes your feet hurt. When I go to the beach I have to wear swim wear because I can't help but wade my way in to all wet. I cannot stay in a canoe. But I don't have easy access to any regular swimming here. So I've been taking showers in the coldest cold water we have, but alas! It is only luke warm.

But there is also winter where I live. And I know for certain that it will come again, and there will be a day, not too many weeks away, that I will be sick and tired of being cold and convinced that I will never be warm again. It will be so cold that I'm afraid to go to the bathroom at night (for whatever reason, the air and heat work worst in my bedroom, nay, in my bathroom, so in the summer, there is no hotter place, and in the winter, no seat is as cold as my toilet seat). I know that will happen again.

I have spent a significent portion of the last 3 weeks at our church's camp. To clarify - it is not a camp you go to in another town and sleep in dirty cabins and get eaten by mosquitoes and eat eggs that seem like they never, ever came from a chicken. Rather, it is a camp because it is a way bigger deal than VBS and costs more and has way more attitude and consumes your life. You go in the morning and come home in the afternoon and just lay on the couch pretty much dead, moving only to eat huge amounts of food or move to a bed.

And at that camp, I've come into contact with lots of school aged children and little ones and adults and teenagers. The school aged children are the campers that the camp is for. The little ones are there because parents like me refuse to take them home because life is miserable without our big people. The adults do things like teaching and guiding and protecting. And the teens are what really make the thing happen.

I have 2 teenagers of my own, and a few more that are nearly teenagers. We don't groan because of our teenagers. We like them a lot. They are among our best friends. No kidding. They're terrific.

But teenagers that don't live at my house make me nervous, self conscious, and very aware that I am not cool. Not only am I not cool, I've never been cool, not even when I was a teenager, and being around them reminds me of it. I'm so not cool, I don't even know what they call it now. What we called cool, I'm sure there's a new term for it, a word or phrase that means you have that thing where you say the right thing all the time and are so popular that you don't have to second guess yourself and wish you hadn't said what you said or did what you did or wore what you wore.

Confidence.

I taught at said camp about confidence all three weeks (comical, isn't it?), but, as is usually the case, I learned about it as I went. I learned that God doesn't measure me like I measure me. He doesn't judge me based on what I look like or am now. He sees the long view. You know, the one I don't have access to except in glimpses He shows me that I have to receive in faith? That long view.

I learned that I only need to listen to what He says about me because He judges rightly, His judgements are true, and I can trust Him.

And I am in a more secure place today because He has been speaking to me lately about who He made me to be. And that's exciting. It's so exciting, it will probably be a different blog. But for the first time in a while, maybe ever, I'm pretty sure of me just and only because I'm quite certain of Him. (that reminds me of a winnie the pooh quote, "I just wanted to be sure of you.")

So even though I am not remotely cool on any level, neither temperature nor image, I am quite at peace. And I'll take peace over cool any day.