My Vintage Summer

Photo by Mike Flamenco on Unsplash

The last few years I’ve found myself daydreaming about the women from my childhood…smoking cigarettes in their muumuus out on the front porch at 7 a.m., coffee in hand, completely unbothered by the pace of the world.

It’s an odd image to linger on.

But what I’ve come to realize is that it’s not really the cigarette I’m longing for. It’s the posture. The rhythm. The sense of a life that wasn’t constantly being pulled apart by notifications, headlines, and the low-grade anxiety of “what am I missing right now?”

A life that begins outside. Not inside a screen.

A life that starts with air, light, and quiet instead of input, noise, and urgency.

And I want to be clear before we go any further: I’m not romanticizing smoking, and I’m not interested in nostalgia that flattens reality. But I do think there’s something about that pre-digital, pre-algorithm rhythm of life that’s worth paying attention to. Something many of us are quietly starving for.

So I’ve decided to call it what it is for me by the help of a friend:

A vintage, yacht rock summer.

And I’m committing to it.

The quiet realization

Too many moments in my life, I catch myself defaulting to convenience instead of presence.

I pacify my kids with screens instead of inviting them into boredom that could turn into creativity.

I make decisions from burnout instead of prayer.

I reach for efficiency when what I actually need is attentiveness.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, my days start to feel less like something I am living and more like something I am surviving.

The reset

So this week I sat my kids down and told them things are changing.

The TV has been unplugged.

The Switch is put away.

Not because screens are inherently evil, but because I’ve watched what they quietly do to our attention, our patience, and our imagination when they become the default.

There are boundaries now:

Movie night on Fridays: together, as a family.

Sonic racing on Sunday nights: loud, competitive, shared.

Mom gets internet access for emails and work on Tuesdays while the boys are with their grandparents.

My phone becomes more like a landline again… encouraging phone calls and saving texts to be answered at the end of the day, not the middle of every moment.

Everything non-essential gets turned off or disabled.

Not as punishment. As resistance.

What fills the space

Because the real question isn’t what we’re removing.

It’s what we’re returning to.

We buy books again, not just scrolls of articles we half-read while multitasking.

We do crafts that leave glue on the table and color on our hands.

We eat ice cream slowly, without documenting it.

We get muddy in the backyard and don’t rush to clean it up.

We ride bikes with neighbors and linger longer than planned.

We cook out with friends without checking the time.

We meet new people at the park instead of passing them while distracted.

We read more.

We pray more slowly.

We journal without trying to make it sound profound.

We lose track of time and discover that we are still okay when we do.

We take ourselves less seriously.

We start noticing that joy doesn’t require optimization.

A different kind of success

There’s a subtle shift that happens in a life like this.

You start realizing how often you’ve been measuring your days by output—productivity, engagement, visibility, impact.

Even in ministry, even in good work, even in sincere calling, it’s possible to build your sense of “success” on what is seen.

But Jesus has a way of gently dismantling that framework.

Not by rejecting fruitfulness…but by reordering identity.

Because if everything depends on outcomes, then everything becomes unstable. Success inflates the ego. Failure collapses it. And both quietly center us on ourselves.

But there is another foundation.

One that is not built on what we accomplish, but on what God has already secured.

A life anchored not in visible results, but in unseen grace.

A name written in heaven.

From that place, we can work without grasping. Serve without striving. Create without needing applause. Love without measuring return.

And maybe that is the most “vintage” thing of all.

The soundtrack of it all

And so the summer has a soundtrack.

Yacht rock playing in the background—not because it’s trendy or ironic, but because it slows everything down just enough to remind us that life is not an emergency and that we have a purpose for this time.

There is room to breathe here.

Room to be interrupted.

Room to be present.

Room to not know what our plans for the next season are.

This is my vintage summer.

Not an escape from life…but hopefully a return to it.

Not a rejection of the modern world, but a refusal to be ruled by it.

And somehow, in the quiet spaces between the noise, I keep finding the same invitation:

Be here.

Be present.

Be free.