Signing off...STEAM in the PARK 2026

Two days home, and I still don't really know what to do with 84 days. I thought I would get here, sleep in my own bed a couple of nights, hug my family, start the laundry, and somehow the words would come. Instead, I keep finding myself sitting quietly and thinking about time. Eighty-four days is a lot of life. It is almost an entire season. And this year, more than any other summer, I am aware that those weren't just days on a calendar. They were days of my life, Steve's life, and days our family lived without us being physically present for much of it.

I don't regret them. But I don't want to romanticize them either. There were days when I was tired. There were days when I wanted to be home. There were moments when something beautiful was happening right in front of me and part of my heart was somewhere else entirely. I think both things can be true. You can know you are exactly where you are supposed to be and still miss the place and people you left behind. You can love your work deeply and still wonder what it costs. Maybe I am finally old enough to stop needing one feeling to cancel out the other.

I have also been thinking about purpose and how differently I understand that word now. We tend to make purpose sound exciting, like once you find yours you wake up every morning filled with energy and certainty. That has not been my experience. Sometimes purpose is breathtaking. Sometimes it is standing beside a river with a group of teachers and thinking, I cannot believe I get to do this. Sometimes it is watching somebody come alive again and knowing you were lucky enough to be there when it happened. And sometimes purpose is carrying another bin when you are exhausted, answering an email when you want to sleep, changing a plan for the fifth time, worrying about money, or doing the work on a day when none of it feels particularly inspiring.

Maybe purpose is simply deciding that something still matters on the days when it is hard.

I think that is where my faith has been living lately too. I wish I could say that after 84 days of mountains and forests and oceans and all that time outside with God, I came home with complete clarity about what happens next. I did not. I have asked God some pretty direct questions this year. I have prayed. I have worried. I have done math at midnight, which is almost never a good spiritual practice. I have asked for signs and answers and, if we are being completely honest, I would have happily accepted a detailed five-year plan with dates, funding sources, and confirmation numbers.

That isn't what I got.

What I got was enough for the day I was in. Somehow, over and over again, there was enough. Enough strength. Enough money. Enough help. Enough laughter. Enough of the right person showing up at the right moment. Enough reason to take the next step. I don't know why I keep expecting God to hand me the whole map when most of my life He has simply given me enough light to see where to put my foot next.

That is uncomfortable for me. I am a planner. I make lists. I make backup lists for the lists. I can take a complicated situation involving people, food, transportation, weather, equipment, and a schedule that has already gone completely off the rails and figure something out. I like solutions. Waiting for something to become clear is considerably harder for me than fixing something that is broken.

Maybe this next season is going to teach me something about that.

And then there are the places themselves. I can't stop thinking about them. After spending so much of the summer on public lands, they feel less like places we visited and more like something we were entrusted with for a little while. We walked through forests we did not plant. We drank from watersheds we did not protect. We followed trails built by hands we will never know. We stood in places that have held human stories for thousands of years before any of us arrived. Everywhere we went, we benefited from somebody who came before us believing that a piece of land was worth saving.

That feels especially important during National Parks Week.

I hope we never become so accustomed to having public lands that we start believing they will simply always be there in the way we know them. If you have ever stood somewhere on public land and thought, this is beautiful, I hope you will understand that beauty needs people willing to stand up for it. If you have found peace there, learned there, healed there, taken your children there, taught your students there, watched wildlife there, or simply stood somewhere and remembered how small you are, then I hope you will pay attention to what happens to these places.

Love them, certainly. Visit them. Take the pictures. Buy the ridiculous souvenir. Hike the trail. Ask the ranger a question they have probably answered 400 times already. But also speak for these places. Support them. Learn what threatens them. Pay attention to decisions being made about them. Fight for them when they need us. Public lands belong to all of us, which means caring for them belongs to all of us too.

I keep thinking about my grandboys when I think about this. I don't want them to grow up looking at my photographs of wild places and hearing me tell them what used to be there. I want them to stand there themselves. I want them to see the animals. I want them to put their hands in cold water, walk beneath old trees, complain about a long trail, get dirt in their shoes, and someday understand why Mimi would not stop talking about getting outside.

At this point in my life, time feels different. There are fewer summers ahead of me than behind me. That isn't depressing to me. It just makes me pay attention. I don't want to spend whatever time I have left rushing through the things I love while worrying about what comes next. I don't want to be so busy building a future that I miss the life happening in front of me. I want to spend my days on people I love and work I believe in. I want to laugh a lot. I want to notice things. I want to fight for places that cannot walk into a meeting and speak for themselves. I want to leave something behind that matters, even if I never completely know how much it mattered.

Maybe that is what these 80 days gave me. Not an answer about what comes next, but a clearer understanding of what I want whatever comes next to be about.

I still don't know what the next chapter looks like. For once, I am trying not to write it before I get there. The suitcases are almost empty, the calendar is strangely quiet, and I am home with the people I missed so much. There will be plenty of time to figure out what is next.

For now, I think I am supposed to be right here.