Fall has arrived. The telltale sign of leaves turning colors – a secret hidden during the spring and summer months but now revealed with the lesser sunlight and cooler days.
Change is around us for it is inevitable this time of year. There really isn’t anything we can do to stop it but view it with wonder. So, the work of God is very much the same. Sometimes evident, sometimes hidden only to be revealed at a later time – like the colors of the leaves.
As we move from one season to the next, this may be a good time to reflect on where and how God has been acting in my life since Fall last year. What were the moments when I knew, quite well, that he was active and obvious? When did I wonder if he would act at all; seeming to be slow in his response?
Did I just allow him to blow away like the leaves fallen from the trees: crispy, brown, and lifeless? Or, did I continue to communicate through prayer and patiently walk in his presence daily?
The cooler days and nights remind us of change. God too offers us a change of heart; to walk away from whatever may be keeping us from allowing our true selves to be formed, shaped, colored, and molded by him.
This descriptive poem, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, captures the spirit of this season:
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
and all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour, adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him!
Happy Autumn!
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