Transitions and the Beautiful Fall Colors

There's just something about seasons. You have summer and winter, which you can always count on to be pretty much the same. Summer is long and hot, Winter is long and cold. Then you have what I like to call the transitional seasons, Spring and Fall.

I have always loved Spring, its so representative of a new beginning. Everything is beautiful and budding and fresh, and it all leads to summer, the season children everywhere look forward to as soon as the pools close in September. Spring is wonderful. But what about Autumn? It leads to Winter, a season mostly known for cold, wet weather, naked trees and soggy scenery. I would almost be tempted to dislike Autumn for this very reason.

Today, however, I was taking a walk outside and I noticed the leaves falling. It was as if time stopped for a moment for me. The breeze picked up and hundreds of red, orange, and yellow leaves blew off the branches of the trees and surrounded me. It was beautiful.

So I thought, how could the end of something so great (summer) be so beautiful? And why do we love the colors of Fall so much when in reality the coloration is actually the death of the leaves?

Is it because we know they have to die so the trees will be beautiful once again in the spring?

Our life can be like this. Well, it is like this. Its full of seasons. We are not always in a summer season where everything is beautiful and warm and full of great things. Sometimes we face dreadful winters. We are cold and tired and weak. Sometimes though, we are neither. We are in transitional seasons. We are in the Spring and Fall. The great thing about these two seasons is that they are both beautiful. They both represent change, they both lead us into another season, we know they won't last forever. These are the seasons where we find ourselves waiting, wondering, sometimes falling, sometimes birthing great things.

And Autumn, though it leads us into Winter, is so great. It gives us a glimpse of what is coming and it gives us time to prepare and often times it allows us to die out to ourselves so that Jesus can make us beautiful once again.