The East Texas Heat Breaks When It Breaks

It is October in East Texas.

If you live here, you know what that means. You also know what it does not mean.

It does not mean the heat is over. It means the heat is allowed to be over. Some years it leaves early. Some years it hangs on like it pays rent.

Then one morning you step outside and the air is different.

Lighter. Drier. You can breathe all the way to the bottom of your lungs for the first time since May.

Nobody rings a bell for it. You can watch the forecast all you want. That morning still catches you a little off guard.

The heat does not care how tough you are

Here is what I had to learn the long way.

Summer does not end because you finally got tough enough to take it.

It ends because the season is over.

You can be the hardest man in the county and it will still be ninety-something at four in the afternoon. You can be soft and complaining the whole way and the first cool morning still shows up right on schedule. Its schedule. Not yours.

What you control is not the season. What you control is how you carry yourself through it.

You drink the water before you are thirsty. You start the hard work early. You find the shade and you do not apologize for using it. You quit the heavy stuff before the worst part of the day instead of trying to prove something to the sun.

None of that shortens summer by one hour.

All of it decides whether you are still standing when summer ends.

I had a long summer

I am not talking about weather anymore, and you know it.

I spent a stretch of my life in a season I could not shorten. I tried. I pushed on every door I could find. Some of that pushing mattered. A lot of it was me standing in the sun at four in the afternoon, yelling at the sky to hurry up.

The sky did not hurry up.

What actually got me through was the boring stuff. The water and the shade version of survival. Get up. Do the next small thing. Write it down. Pray even on the days it felt like talking to a ceiling. Do not spend tomorrow's strength on today's anger.

I did not do all of that well. I did enough of it.

And then one morning the air was different.

Joseph did not pick the day either

Genesis 50:20 gets quoted like a happy ending. Read the chapters before it.

Joseph did not choose when the pit ended. He did not choose when the prison ended. He did not choose the day Pharaoh sent for him. He did the work that was in front of him in every one of those rooms, for years, without a calendar telling him how many were left.

What was meant for evil got turned to good. Yes. But the turning happened on God's schedule, and Joseph's job in the meantime was to keep being the kind of man who would be ready when it came.

That is the part I hold on to now.

Not that the hard season ends. That the hard season ends, and I am supposed to still be useful when it does.

If you are still in August

Maybe it is October where you are and it still feels like August inside.

I am not going to tell you the front is coming tomorrow. I do not know that. Nobody does.

I will tell you it is coming. Seasons end. That is what makes them seasons.

So drink the water. Find the shade. Do the heavy work early and leave the rest for tomorrow.

Be standing when the air changes.