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There is a certain bit of nostalgia that comes with Fall. It’s the turning of the leaves, the sweatshirt weather, the giant inflatable dragons folks put up in their lawns to mark the coming of Halloween. It’s the pumpkins that adorn our family homes, the warm cups of coffee in the morning. The earth is changing before our eyes, as she prepares for the dead of winter.
If most of the time we don’t really pay attention to our surroundings, during Fall it is hard not to. The leaves, in all their yellows and reds and browns, shout out to us that change is here. And ready or not, that change is going to affect us in big and small ways.
The way we worship and experience God has a special relationship with the changing of seasons. It’s why we celebrate Advent during the shift to winter, and Lent during the harsh cold months, and the Easter resurrection during the first blooms of Spring. But the changing of seasons also teaches us something about ourselves, too. Namely, that change is not only inevitable, it is necessary for life to flourish.
This is one of the harder truths about life. On the whole, we are uncomfortable with change. There are a whole slew of reasons - it reminds us we’re not fully in control, it agitates the way we think the world works or ought to work, it brings about uncertainty in our present and our future. Perhaps at the top of the list, though, is that we are generally stubborn. Simply put, we don’t like change because we don’t think we need to change. The world today, with our love of individualism and our embrace of hyper-partisan politics, does little to help.
Change is inevitable. That’s not a conjecture, it is a fact of life. And we can try to push back against it, I guess. If that’s what we decide, we simply drop our eyes and refuse to look at the world around us. We can go back to class or work or whatever it is that is most familiar to us and pretend that everything is fine. If our life begins to change anyway, we have options. We can be stoic. We can refuse to accept it. We can put all of your energy into ignoring it and insist in spite of all the evidence that it is not happening. If that does not work, we can become angry, actively defending ourselves against the unknown and spending all of our time trying to get our life back the way it used to be. And then of course we can become bitter, comparing ourselves to everyone else whose lives are more agreeable than ours and lamenting our unhappy fate. If we succeed in all this, our life may not be an easy one, but we can rest assured that God will not trouble us ever again.
Or we can accept that change is inevitable, and that it is good. We can decide to be a daredevil, a test pilot, a gambler. We can decide to take part in a plan we did not choose, doing things we do not know how to do for reasons we do not entirely understand. We can take part in a thrilling and dangerous scheme with no script and no guarantees. We can agree to experience God and one another in new and renewed ways.
Deciding to accept change does not mean that we are not afraid, by the way. It just means that we are not willing to let our fear stop us, that we are not willing to let our fear keep us locked away from God’s unfolding beauty.
“To live is to change, and to change often is to become more perfect.” St. John Henry Newman
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