Today is beautiful. It is 86, low humidity, blue sky, and white puffy clouds. But one of the things I am noticing today is the way the sun is coming in my apartment at a lower angle than it has all summer. And this, of course, means that fall is coming. I have always been fascinated by the changes in nature throughout the year – the way the leaves turn, the way the sky changes from gray to blue, the way the shadows begin to change. One of my biggest joys in living at Princeton for 3 years was knowing, by the third year, the order in which trees would lose their leaves. And there was a comfort in this, that life would continue on. The church tends to shy away from such thinking for fear of dabbling in paganism. However, Genesis 1:14-15 says, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.’ And it was so.”
As I am no longer in school, I can no longer mark fall by the beginning of classes. I am tempted to mark fall by the prevalence of articles on ESPN.com about football. But Genesis tells me that the seasons bear witness to the creation of God. Fall is coming. In the changing season, will we find joy in more than just the pigskin and the pumpkin?
Autumn is one of my favorite seasons…maybe even my favorite. It’s one of the things I do enjoy about being in the Northeast – the colors we get here far surpass anything I’ve seen in other parts of the country (or the world, for that matter). Of course in Alaska when the birch trees would turn yellow and you had this contrasted against the blue of the mountains with their white “termination dust” (as we called it) starting to appear on their peaks, it was really stunning, but still Alaska lacked the bright, vivid reds and oranges which we get from our maple & oak trees making them look on fire. So amazing. I may just have to get out with my camera this year and capture some of that.
I love the fall and the seasons in general. Where I grew up there weren’t seasons, though no shortage of amazing beauty bearing witness to God :)