The predictability of change

Dr. Donna Mann

                     

I recently overheard someone refer to the fall colours as 'God's bouquet of colour.' I couldn't agree more. This year has been a splendid colourful year especially for the Ontario reds. It has been like a pageant with the various trees changing frocks when the sun shone from different dimensions. The trees have gone through a process of fully submitting to reds, yellows, and oranges. Complete hardwood bushes submitted before our eyes as if a master painter had taken a broad-brush stroke and spread multiple shades across its branch tips.

But, there is still another surprise. As bare trees stand tall across the horizon, splashes of deep green have begun to protrude across the landscape: single evergreens, here and there, perhaps not as conspicuous as they grew among the tall colourful trees, but now they gain a natural recognition. What a find!

The seasons teach us wonderful lessons of life. It is in the dying that the leaf takes on the vibrant colours of beauty. It is experiencing the bitter frigid frost that the soft summer greens submit to the luxurious artwork of

fall. It is in the letting go of one season that trees can totally enter into another. It is in the loss of one splendor that another beauty is discovered. Changes in the seasons bring about changes in the scenery. Transformation only happens as one life cycle lives out its purpose and is open to the next one.

Is it so in human nature as well? I keep asking people if they noticed an infusion of colour this fall thinking that perhaps it was just I. Granted, this fall has been very different for me. I've had time to look around, to watch life at work, and to see the season change -- a luxury that often didn't happen when I was working full time out of the home. Retirement, change of residence, cashing in some GIC's for house renovations, fear in uncertainties can all create some worry lines, some frost bites until you

see the beauty and the colour that changes in life bring.

In some ways, my life is like the leaf. Some area of it is constantly dying so that new life may happen in another area. Predictable changes bring about transformation. Unexpected circumstances create indelible marks on life. Expected flows of life create colourful results. Seasons of grief birth goodness of life. There is a balance, there is a beauty, there is hope that the world is unfolding as it should and there is a loving Creator at work in nature as well as human nature.

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