Autumn

If it wasn’t for the rain, autumn would be one of my favourite times of the year. I love the low sun casting its long shadows, bathing everything in a golden glow. I love the crispness in the air: cold enough to see your breath, but without the wind that blows the cold deep into your bones. I love the colours of the landscape as the sun brings them out, the greens of the fields against the blue of the sky, the golden browns of the trees just before their leaves fall.

Call me simple, but I like the crisp crackle and crunch of autumn leaves as you wade through them. I have to suppress an almost irresistible urge to kick the neatly swept piles, scattering them to the four winds again.

Why do leaves fall off trees? Most trees let go of their leaves on cue. Wind or frost may strip a few early, but mostly the tree itself releases them. A friend of mine has a beech hedge that doesn’t.

It looks beautiful in autumn. Its leaves stay on until the spring, even though they are dead. Then new life pulses through the hedge and the new leaves start to bud and push the old dead leaves off. And the hedge is covered in a coat of fresh vibrant green.

There’s something of a parable there – life works like this too. When we look at ourselves we see things we’d like to pluck off and be done with: outbursts of anger, words that cut to the heart, ugly attitudes that have plagued us for a lifetime. But no matter how hard we try we can’t seem to shake them.

That’s where the lesson of the beech hedge comes in—it’s new life from within that shifts the old leaves.

And that is what God promises. He says through the prophet Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). Notice it’s a promise, not an instruction. The hedge doesn’t manage its own spring – it receives it. This is what Jesus offers: not a better version of the old leaves, but new life that pushes the old out.

So this autumn, as you wade through the leaves and enjoy the crunch of them, it’s worth asking what you’ve been trying to pluck off by yourself, and whether it’s time to ask the One who gives new life.