Summer Lifestyle Playlist

With the arrival of a fresh new season (albeit a hot + muggy one here in the Heartland) comes a fresh opportunity to re-center your heart and mind and consider what you want to have experienced when we mark August 31 off the proverbial calendar. What will Summer 2025 look like for you?

The benefit of summer brings my family a little more flexibility in the schedule to travel with my evangelist husband. The school year tethers me and our daughters, now teenager and young adult, to home with classes to attend, activities at school, and connection to friends at church. When school dismisses, we hit the road a little more frequently and savor the long-awaited, uninterrupted time together with one another--a form of "getting the band back together", if you will. The college girl comes home for the summer and even she will venture out with us a few weekends here and there.

Kicking off our summer is a ministry trip to the east coast, around which we are planning some vacation days. A few weeks back I challenged each member of the family to create their own playlist of new, timeless, or favorite songs they'd like to share with the rest of us. We'll have plenty of road time to blast the tunes and get to know one another even better.

It is with this concept of a playlist that I'll be sharing a short blog series throughout the month of June, challenging you to craft your own summer lifestyle playlist. This isn't supposed to be a bucket list of must-experience-tourist-traps. And it's not designed to create more fall-short goals that will heap up the guilt points if you don't fulfill them. No, this summer lifestyle playlist should be made up of some ideals, personal preferences, a "I just want to start over" kind of mindset.

How do you want to live out this summer?

Let's crank up the music and hit the road, friend. I can't wait to hear what you're playin'.