Two weeks ago I returned from Albania, where I had been teaching a class on the Parables of Jesus at the Udhekryq Bible School in Erseke. Last night Nancy returned from the same place, where she had been teaching conversational English to adults in the town. Every time we go to Erseke we are blessed by the people there, the beauty of the place, and the chance to serve with some pretty amazing people.

Now we are back together and on duty as parents and grandparents—another blessing. And we are back in our little home in a very beautiful place—especially in the fall. Nancy missed most of the color but I was back in time to be awed by the reds and golds and browns of the leaves first hanging on then dropping off the grand trees all around us. Those leaves are now piled outside most of the homes in our area, awaiting the city trucks to come and take them away, but before meeting such an ignoble end they had their day of nobility. Locals say they cannot remember a fall in which good weather lasted as long, and during which the colors were so glorious. But I am sure that ordinary falls are spectacular as well.

Thinking about the splashes of color and the fall of leaves I am reminded that the colors are actually signs of death. The colors come because the leaves have erected an impermeable barrier between themselves and the nutrients that flow naturally from the rest of the tree. They cut themselves off from their life-source, and then they die. Their demise is impressive, but it is still their death. The leaves look pretty, but that beauty proves they cannot survive.



Perhaps this is a sort of analogy to human life. As long as we are connected to the source of our life, that is God himself, we are truly alive. But as soon as we create a barrier between ourselves and God his life does not enliven our lives, and we die. The marks of death may not be as visible as the changing color of a leaf, but they are inevitably present. There is a hardness, a brittleness, a coldness that creeps in. Instead of being able to sway in the winds of change and trouble we are blown away by them. Instead of being a productive part of a whole, a colony that lives and breathes, giving life-giving oxygen to other living things, we become isolated and alone. Ultimately we fall all by ourselves, like each leaf that slowly flutters in solitude to the ground.



But if there is an analogy, the analogy fails because God, the source of our life, is always able and eager to restore us to himself, to give us life once again. Unlike the leaf which, once severed from the tree, can never return, we can return. We can be engrafted, recovered and renewed. That is the good news. A leaf that turns golden in the fall is not comforted by the knowledge that in the spring a new leaf may sprout to take its place on the tree. The only good news would be if the gold leaf had some hope of being re-attached to the tree, of reestablishing its line of nutrition—but leaves cannot do that. Once colored in the shades of fall, it has no hope. But the opposite is true for us. We can, through grace, know once again the pulse of life. We can be returned to where life is, and re-attached to that life.

So, the fall is spectacular—but it has a sadness to it because it marks the end of life. But, unlike the leaf, we do not exist as beings with no hope. We have the hope that is in Christ, the hope of being new creations, the hope that Paul spoke of in 2 Corinthians 5:17, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! That is truly good news any season of the year…