The Longest Day of Light

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“Today is the longest day of the year,” Mom would say one evening late in June, then shoo us out the back door to drink up every last drop of light, because, she said, the evenings would only be getting shorter from now till December. So I’d lie over the swing after dinner, brushing my fingers across the dirt, ready to go back inside but not daring to. Not on the longest day.

Back then, I didn’t realize that the next day would be shorter by only two seconds. Two seconds were two seconds, and we weren’t to waste the sunlight. By June 30^th, it would be twenty seconds, and come August, we’d be robbed nearly two full minutes of daylight.

Mom announced the shortest day of the year too, usually when we were serving up dinner in the dark. I’ve always thought of winter as a shrinking season, where the light flees and hibernates with the black bears. But the shrinking really comes between June and December— on those hot nights of fireworks and fireflies and wiffle ball, when you’re too busy to notice the daylight slipping away.

Ecclesiastes calls this a gift from God— that man “will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with the joy in his heart” (Ecc. 5:20). You don’t think about winter settling in when you’re rising with the sun and using up its long, hot, generous light— when you’re watering the garden and pickling cucumbers and mowing.

You don’t often think about death when you’re really living.

Of course, that doesn’t make death any less inevitable. “Time and chance happen to them all,” and just as the sun rises on summer, it lies down for winter “and hastens to the place where it rises.” Life under the sun will always be cartwheeling toward an end— winds blowing, streams flowing, sunlight stretching, stretching, stretching, then dwindling again.

Life can feel like a night out in the snow — blistering and dark.

But sometimes, life feels like the summer solstice — like the best and longest day.

It’s freeing that God calls light “good” and tells us to enjoy it while it lasts. “Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun” (Ecc. 11:7), so drink it up. Swing and catch fireflies until after nine. And when the light does at last leave you, rest well, knowing the night is short, and the sun will someday rise on the first morning of an endless summer.

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“I perceived there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil— this is God’s gift to man.”

~ Ecclesiastes 3:12-13

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