Personal Narrative: Growing Up In Palm Desert

Growing up summer was a love and hate relationship for me. I grew up in a town called Palm Desert in the Palm Springs area in Southern California for all of my life. Summer there is not exactly typical in terms of “hot weather”. This so called “hot weather” might be various degrees different from what I know as hot.

Hot in the Coachella Valley can range from over 100 degrees to 120 degrees as the highest. Growing up I always had to make the most of my own summer. While I did get the opportunity to leave the desert for the summer, during most of my life in order to travel around the states, Mexico, Europe, and once Honduras as well as the Caribbean I still stayed for at least 2- 3 weeks before I adventured off.

If you live in an area where

If you find yourself with no plans, why not try to invest your summer in service? Christ called us to love one another as well as serve.

I can speak from experience that when I had to stay in the desert for two months in the summer, I took 6 days out of the week to train for my high school varsity swim team, volunteer at my church,and complete summer assignments for AP/ honors classes in order to transfer that credit to my future university. I decided that I wasn’t going to waste my summer away.

If you don’t have the opportunity to travel over the summer just know that you’ll have an array of opportunities in the future. Even if you don’t get chances to travel through your family, there are still opportunities to travel. Just ask your local church.

Perhaps they are planning on going on a short term Mission trip? Whether you have opportunities to train for a sport, write, work, etc, do it all for the glory of Christ. In fact even when it’s not summer you can still take the opportunity to dedicate a lifetime of service.

But if you haven’t begun already, summer just may be your first opportunity to become involved in a service