Genesis 8:22 ESV
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
We have reached the time of year where, especially around here, the leaves are starting to blaze bright with different colors along the hillside. The leaves, which seem like they just burst forth, are now withering and starting to fade away; the grass, which had been lush and green, is starting to turn brown. Things are coming to a close. That is the thing about fall; it’s not quite the end. Winter is the end… but fall… Fall is the beginning of the end. The leaves are starting to turn but still hanging on. The nice days are getting fewer and farther between but still coming. The days getting shorter but not too short yet. It’s a season of almost rest, but not quite time to rest.
Every year I feel the desire to rest hard this time of year. To take long slow walks admiring the landscape as the colors vary week to week. It is also a time of clearing out clutter and paring down. In summer I spend every spare minute outside and when I am forced to be indoor more than I am out of doors, I find myself wanting to pare down, clean up, and clear out—I am in a state of preparation, trying to make my dwelling as homey as possible for the months that we will soon be spending inside our house.
Fall is a season for me of everything coming full circle. Everything that was starting a few months ago, is now ending—yet ending only for a few months, then the cycle will restart. Back in Jesus day, they viewed years as more of a circle than something linear linking one after each other as we view our years, and I like that. I like the thought of interlocking circles like a chain that causally link one after the other, rather than a bunch of rulers, each with a harsh end point lined up, one after each other, measuring out the time of our lives insisting that we not waste one minute because the end is already insight. I like the chain better, with its gentle twists and turns that life takes us on.
When we are in a fall season of our lives it can be hard to think that life will ever be green and full of life again. I think of Job—he had a wonderful life. Job had grown wealthy and prosperous. He had a large family, and his children were grown—he seemed to be in the latter years of his life. Then disaster strikes. Satan asks God to challenge Job’s faith and God agrees and then ensues the roughest patch of life Job has yet seen. All of children—dead. His wealth? Destroyed. His good health? That too was taken away. Yet, Job keeps his faith. He asks God some tough questions and gets a little indignant, and God calls Job out for these things… but again Job keeps his faith. And God rewards him, giving him back his wealth and riches, and blessing him with more children!
Things don’t always work out like that, but so often there is new life buried underneath all the hard stuff we have to persevere through to get there. There is fall and there is winter in our lives, but there is always a spring too! Life always comes full circle sooner or later, and for believers there is always new, and eternal life awaiting us in Heaven.