When Fall Has Fallen

Hello, October, with your delicious splashes of pumpkin spice and chilled cider, your bulky sweaters and tall boots and plaid wooly blankets. I’ve missed how your burnt leaves crunch underfoot. Bunches of new pencils are gathered as fresh autumn flowers, each being plucked and carried off to class. Flickering faces adorn twighlight porches, and the smell of bonfires tints the crisp air. Little ones come seeking sweets, bedtime blissfully postponed for one happy evening, while caffeinated parents follow in their wake, absorbing the last bit of warmth before the winter sneaks under their doors. Apples pile high. Birds cry southward. And the trees flaunt like giant red peacocks with every ounce of their strength.

Can you feel the anticipation? Autumn brings with it a quiet sense of hope, an inherent longing for all things to be made new and joyful. If you pause long enough, can you witness the earth turn coolly over to sleep? The clouds swish along with grey frost? The coffee mugs and teacups in a thousand homes fill to the brim?

In what ways can you echo creation during this season? Shall you play the leaf, bravely releasing your controlling hold on life and letting go? (Where might the Lord take you?) Or the squirrel, gathering goods for the coming cold and turning your focus in toward your home? (How could your family have transformed over the long summer?) Perhaps the pumpkin—scooped out and filled up with a new kind of light? (Has Christ been meaning to work in a particular area of your life?) Or the rain that provides a way for the foliage to turn beautifully? (Who could you pour into?) The vibrant, late-blooming mums, displaying the tenacity of their Creator? (Which aspect of your life has waited, dormant, for far too long?) Maybe the fields which have been harvested and are now coming to rest? (Could you be called to a sabbath?)

As we dwell on the spectacular beauty of this season—in both our year and our lives—may we be bold enough to ask what Christ would like to do in us and among us and through us to the praise of His glorious grace.

Even the stork in the sky knows her seasons; and the turtledove and the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration.

(Jeremiah 8:7a)