Lessons From Autumn

   

     I sit in my car on a quiet street in a neighborhood near my house. The grey road laps around the brown feet of the trees, their long arms reaching skyward with sleeves of green, gold and fiery red. The pale blue of the sky washes over all as a breeze rustles the tawny heads of the trees. Leaves drop to my car and inside like rain falling through open windows. My heart squeezes in my chest. Mama and I would have sat on this street and admired the colors, savored the chill in the air and the Autumn scents.  But here I am alone, missing her so much I can hardly breathe. I think that's what's making Fall harder this year, and harder to enjoy. I feel like my eyes see the colors but my spirit isn't registering them like I usually do. I can describe them, even beautifully, but I feel like they come with a pinch rather than a warmth. Probably because I too feel that my spirit is in its own kind of Autumn and the winds are stripping my soul of its leaves until I am undone, relying solely on my roots for stability and nourishment. A year ago the Lord told me I was like a tree and that I would endure storms that would bend and break me, but that I would continue to stand and flourish because my roots were wrapped around the Rock -- around Him.

      My thoughts meander from those words, that promise, from the Lord that seems so long ago to the shower of red and yellow falling from the trees. The leaves drift with the breeze in their glorious act of dying. Dad pointed that out the other day. He mused about how the most beautiful things trees do is change their colors in the fall. It's this very act of dying that we find most beautiful and yet, in that act, the tree is letting go of what brings it life throughout the year and is in a last show of brilliance, preparing itself to hibernate in the months of cold and storm. I wonder, do our lives look like that to God. Beautiful in their acts of dying? Does our death help us to shed what we have always relied on, to instead dig deep and drink long from our roots and not our plumage? To prepare for the spring of our souls that will bring fruit in due season? I wonder. I hope so. I hope the seasons of my soul bring me back to full reliance on Him and bring Him glory at all times. I want to point to His beauty as I bud with flowers, feed others with His goodness when my fruit ripens for the harvest, blaze with his brilliance in my dying and show people how to dig down and drink deep of His very self in the hard winter seasons. Autumn is teaching me new lessons this year as I reflect on all that has happened and all God has done, is doing and is going to do. I gaze on the beauty of the leaves topped with the rich colors of Fall and I look forward to drinking from the River of God that restores my soul as my roots wind quietly down into the earth and around the Rock -- Jesus Christ -- in this season.