Premature Season Change

By Cynthia Ruchti –

As I write this, I’m surrounded by the wonder of a warm autumn day, one that smells like toasted summer. The autumn light spotlights the bright colors of the autumn trees and autumn-crisped grasses, perfuming the autumn air with that mellow, smooth, ripe fragrance of cottonwood at its peak and rusty pine needles, of apples begging for picking and tomato plants giving up their last fruits of harvest.

By the time you read this, few places this far north will have leaves on the trees. The staccato dance of color and rustle will have given way to the rattle of bare boned branches against one another, brown against a gray November sky.

Autumn seems too short of a season, most years. And sometimes that’s my fault. I cheat it of its shelf life, because I know what’s coming–winter.

Winter–not my favorite time of year, living in this land of ice and cold, snow and blizzards, closed roads and colorlessness; unless you count white as a color.

Winter–the season that seems endless, its days short and bone-chilling.

Autumn, on the other hand, calls for sweatshirts and long hikes through the opening woods, for s’mores over the campfire and quilt cocoons, great sleeping weather with the windows open and the down comforters piled high, pumpkins and earthtone decorations and Thanksgiving and putting up the garden’s produce.

But I hesitate in autumn, never taking a full breath, because I know what the season right behind it will demand.

A cancer patient in remission might fail to take a full breath, knowing she’ll have another biopsy six months or a year from now. A parent of a pre-teen might miss some of the beauty because of a premature, imagined chill still years distant. A marriage might suffer from a similar syndrome: “We made it through that crisis, but there’s bound to be another one ahead”.

When God said through Solomon that there was a season for everything (Ecclesiastes 3), I wonder if He also was telling us not to cheat the season we’re in. To plan for, but not pre-live, the crises of the next or opposite season.

“Don’t you be talking when it’s the season to be silent,” He might rephrase that instruction. “Don’t feel loss when it’s the season of gain. Don’t pre-worry about a season of death and miss the season of living.”

PRAYER: Father God, why should thoughts of an icy wind trouble me on a day like today when the sun is blindingly bright against the yellow leaves, the breeze merely cool, not cold? So fill my sense with this present moment that I don’t miss Your Presence in it!

“There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens” (Ecclesiastes 3:1 CEB).