Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Fall Leaves

I love this time of year! Autumn. I could just stop there. Say no more. Breathe. Take it in. I don’t know just what it is about this season that enlivens me. Maybe the change in temperature (and in humidity here in the south). Maybe the breeze. Maybe the impending prospect of October’s bright blue weather. High school and college football. Harvest moon and Halloween.
Maybe my mysterious connection with autumn comes from the annual childhood return to school and friends, becoming socially engaged again, and teachers who not only taught me to love learning but who genuinely cared about me as well.
Autumn also brings memories of transitions. My mother and my wife’s father both died a few autumns ago. So there is also loss and, thereby, grief memories during this season of wonderfully mottled colors and decaying foliage.
But all of it feels right.
Delight. Hope. Loss. Change. Transitions. This is that time of year for me when all those things seem most natural. What looks like, and in many ways is, death and decay are beginning the long process of becoming re-formed. New. But not in the sense of the way they were new before. Rather, completely new, as in different. Similar perhaps, but also differently new.
Embrace it! (Or die forever). I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he talked about eternal life he came to bring – life in all its fullness.
What does this autumn look like, feel like, within your own body? Within your own spirit? Within your own soul? May you be re-newed by this holy transformation.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
Isaiah 43:19 (NRSV)

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