End of Summer Reflection Questions for Your Journal

Summer ends without a ceremony. One week the evenings are long and the next the school run is back, and the whole stretch closes without anyone stopping to look at it.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 says that for everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. A season ending is worth marking rather than simply surviving. That is the reason to sit down with these before September takes the memory of it. Twelve questions follow. Take three or four in a sitting, over a week, and let the summer be counted before it disappears.

What Actually Happened

1. What are the three days from this summer I will still remember in five years?

2. Who did I spend the most time with, and was that a choice or an accident?

3. What did I do for the first time?

4. What did I plan for that never happened, and do I mind?

What Changed in Me

5. What am I less afraid of than I was in May?

6. What did I learn about my own limits?

7. Where did I get something wrong, and what did it cost?

8. What have I been avoiding all summer that is still waiting?

Where God Was in It

9. What did I ask God for in June, and what happened?

10. Where did I see him at work in someone else's life this summer?

11. What has he been saying that I keep not acting on?

12. What do I want to thank him for before this season closes?

How to Work Through Them

Take three or four at a sitting rather than all twelve. The last four in a long run always get the thinnest answers.

Write the question at the top of a page and give it more room than you think it needs. Answers that begin as one line often turn into something else by the third sentence.

Do not tidy the writing. Nobody is reading this and honesty is the whole value.

Answer them in whatever order they open. The middle four are the hardest and there is no requirement to arrive at them first, or at all in the same week.

Read It Back Before You Close the Notebook

When the twelve are done, read them all in one sitting. That reading is where the summer becomes a shape rather than a pile of weeks.

Underline one sentence to carry into autumn. Only one, so it stays sharp enough to remember.

Date the pages. Next August you will want to read this year's answers before you write new ones, and undated entries are surprisingly hard to place.

Do It Before the Season Turns

These questions answer differently in early September than they do in late October, when the summer has already gone soft in the memory.

Open a notebook this week and take the first four.

It matters less that the summer was good than that it was noticed. Even a difficult one is worth counting, and the counting is often what makes it usable later.