Faith life

Winter is really coming.

Not that I doubted it, but for so long the rest of our town was in the throes of fall foliage, but our street remained thick with green leaves.

Now however, the last of the leaves have fallen victim to a wind storm and the trees are bare.

I know this, because I spent all of yesterday afternoon raking up the last of these leaves and my arms are quite achy today.

But I digress.

I did have a point other than complaining about raking.

As I looked up and down the street and noticed how stark the trees look with their naked limbs, it made me think of the promise of faith. Most of us would prefer to be in the summer green of life. Especially when it comes to our faith walk. To have a rich, full, faith life, rather than at the end of fall where it is barren and dark. But like the trees, we will all go through times where we are empty and not sure where God is, where we stand on our faith walk.

But rather than accept these times as natural and normal and even necessary to our growth, our tendency is to fight against this time. To seek and search for God and answers rather than just to be in the moment. But the trees do not worry about the spring. They stand there with their empty, black branches just waiting for what will come in due time. They know (well they may not really know, but follow my analogy would you) that spring will come. That they won't be empty forever. And so they wait, with faith, to see what the future will bring.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have that same faith? To not worry about the dark times, but to just know, to have faith, that spring and summer will come. To recognize that the winter times are important in their own right, but that when things are dark and dreary, they won't stay that way. To wait like the trees with their branches stretched upward and to know that God will take care of things in His most perfect way.