Summer Didn’t Break Your Discipleship Plan. It Was Always the Plan.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7, ESV)

The school year ends and something panics inside us a little. The structure that held everything together — the routine, the sense that we were at least moving through something — disappears. For families with mixed needs, that panic has extra edges. Schedules that regulated our kids evaporate. The supports that made the days manageable go quiet for two months. And schedule changes can throw some into a tailspin.

Somewhere underneath all of that, there’s a smaller, more specific worry: what happens to discipleship when the days stop having a shape?

The shift from school to summer doesn’t have to break your discipleship plan. In fact, it may actually be the best thing for it.

Moses didn’t tell the Israelites to carve out a dedicated discipleship hour. He told them to talk about God’s commands when they sat at home, when they walked along the road, when they lay down, when they got up. The whole sweep of ordinary life was the curriculum. Not the formal lesson — the life lived around it.

Summer is that. Long, unscripted, sometimes chaotic, occasionally boring — and full of exactly the kind of moments Moses was describing. The argument over who gets the front seat. The afternoon with nothing to do. The first time your child sees the ocean or a mountain range and doesn’t have words for what they feel. The visit to grandparents who love them but don’t always understand them. These aren’t gaps in the discipleship calendar. They are the discipleship calendar.

This is especially true for mixed-needs families. The sensory overwhelm of a new place, the dysregulation that comes with broken routine, the sibling tension that simmers all the way through July — none of this is discipleship’s enemy. It is discipleship’s raw material. Character isn’t formed in the easy moments. It’s revealed and shaped in the hard ones, when the real stuff comes to the surface where you can actually work with it.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean summer requires no intention. It means the intention shifts. Instead of asking “when will we do our Bible time?” we ask “what is God doing in what’s already happening?” Instead of mourning the loss of structure, we look at what the unstructured hours are exposing — in your kids, and honestly, in us (yeah, our discipleship is happening too in the most challenging of summer moments).

June through August is not a season to survive until school starts again. It’s a long, slow walk along the road Moses was talking about. Your kids are watching how you handle the detour, the delay, the day that didn’t go as planned.

That’s the lesson. You’re already teaching it.

If you need some encouragement during these summer days, I encourage you to check out our 7 Days to Fewer Blowups at Home – it’s just 7 minutes each day to help you find your peace.