Reflections on Change

Last week I was stopped by a leaf so beautiful on the road outside college that I stood there entranced by it for a few moments, and picked it up and just sort of marvelled at it.

I’ve had a very seasonal last couple of weeks, nestled over the course of some alternately sunshine-y and rainy autumnal days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about change and the joys and the challenge and the heartache that can involve – as is the way when a relationship comes to an end.

Change is a wonderful and beautiful thing, but it is also hard. Sometimes I find myself homesick for another point of time, or I feel locked out of a particular memory and long to taste that moment in a way that it is already lost to me.

Last week I saw glory in the fallen leaf I picked up, but it was a glory that I could not preserve. In the same way, there is glory in the passing of time, but again it is one that I cannot bottle, as much as I sometimes try.

I read today that the happiest person on earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. Isn’t that just a beautiful thought? I want to live – and in my living, worship – as nature does.

I want learn to bring glory to God in the way that I am made, and I want to be turned to gold just as the leaves are. I want to I revel in the beauty of my time, like it says in Ecclesiastes.

Nature lives in season, and part of mirroring this is I think not forgetting that we are made to move in and with time. We cannot always stay put. This is change, a wonderful beautiful thing.

And it is a wonderful and beautiful thing that in this life we are all just walking each other home. But this is also part of the sadness and what it is to grieve when the end of a relationship or close friendship comes around – someone is not around to share in the walk home of life as long as you once thought that they might be. The point of departure is a sad; though the goodness and sweetness of that season goes unaltered.

I am trying to remember that the glory of time works like the seasons; winter may come but spring will always follow. Everything happens in such a way that everything else can happen on top of it: leaves falling from the trees happens in such a way that leaves can grow again. And when night comes, the day will follow.

I rarely love a song on the first time I hear it through in the way that I did when first played ‘From my Window’ by Bill Jones. The chorus begins “and the clocks go round and round like ragged rascals/what was morning soon is afternoon“. And that fits right with now.

“Where morning dawns and where evening fades, your bring forth songs of joy”

Psalm 65:8