It's July!

It’s July!

I have this odd affinity for the month of July. I can dress my baby in everything red, white, and blue and for a few weeks we don’t stand out. It is the start of the really sunny season where we live (that is July and August, for those of you who are not from Seattle). But it also is the longest month my kids are out of school. There are no family birthday’s in July. In some ways it could just be a “filler” month, but it isn’t.

See, I love calendars and dates and attaching meaning to dates. When I was a little girl, our phone book had pages with the calendar for the next several years. Yes, now I can pull it up on my phone, but at the time, I loved those pages. Full of possibility. Full of knowing when your birthday would next land on a Saturday. How do leap years change the day of the week Christmas will fall on when I am 10 years old. Definitely the best pages of the phone book.

I can remember many things tied to certain dates. I will amaze my family with “7 years ago today we were doing this or that” or “in two years Christmas will be on a Sunday and I wonder how that will impact our plans for church”. Ok, fine, maybe I don’t so much as amaze them as I annoy them, whatever, they love me. Almost as much as I love dates on the calendar.

Let’s get back to July and why July is important. When I was a child, we went on a family vacation one year to a resort not far from our home. On the Sunday morning of our visit, we watched workers pressure wash a deck (super exciting vacation times, I know!). Someone in our group wondered how often they did that job. We thought it could be every Sunday. But it was also July 1^st. So it could be weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, or even biannually! It was a fairly silly and inconsequential debate that I have remembered for over 2 decades. Why? Because it showed how many different time increments start on July 1^st (especially if July 1^st is a Sunday, like this year).

July is just full of starts!! It isn’t usually seen this way. January gets the big billing for starting new things, but July should be right up there in its possibilities! We still have half a YEAR left to do the things we wanted to do this year. That is exciting. We still have six more months. We have two quarters left. We have 26 weeks, people. There is so much we can do if we start right now!

If we had intentions in January that we didn’t quite get to, we are only at half time, we can start now and finish very well. If we look back on the first six months and don’t like what we see, we can finish the second half stronger. It’s JULY!!

For me, I am excited to report that my one and only goal I was planning to focus on for 2018 is going well. I cut back to one goal because it was that important to me and with that, I have successfully made the half way mark. I am celebrating and continuing strong on this in July.

But I also realize that there are a couple other things I need to not let slide. Instead of thinking “well, guess the year is a bust, I will get that started in January”, I decided to make some new goal charts. Add a couple new things. I can do this! I have the whole second half of the year to make these in to habits before we event get to January.

It’s July! A month of fresh possibilities. A perfect time to start something, to celebrate the halfway of accomplishment, to refocus on intentional living and finishing the year strong. What can you do with this possibility month to finish the year strong? Let’s go get it!!