letting the beautiful things go

Can we just talk about seasons for a minute?

The other day I actually managed to get up early and take my dog for a “jog” (only, mind you, because I wanted to make crepes that morning and the batter had to settle for an hour). The sun hadn’t been up quite long enough to burn off the frost by the time we started walking back, so I kept getting distracted by tiny flower clusters and red leaves and grass blades encased in their own little intricate ice crystal palaces. World Race training camp had only ended a few days earlier…our official launch date was set and the eleven weeks in between were already falling away too quickly. My thoughts kept coming back to how much I love the life I have here, right now.

 

I love our family’s dog. I love the next two months’ promise of spending Christmas and birthdays and Thanksgiving in my family’s house, sharing m&m-covered caramel apples and classic movies and pumpkin bagels at Einstein with them. I love mornings by myself when I can play Ludovico Einaudi’s Oltremare on the piano with the sun streaming in the front door. I love my church community, how it feels to worship in the dark on Sunday nights and microfoam milk for lattes and laugh with them. I love the school I’ve worked and studied at for the past almost-six years, that community I’ve gotten to walk with for so long as we try to get through ten-hour lab days explaining unit conversions over and over (and over), to keep each other awake through nights of grading entire boxes of lab reports, to raise funds to buy a stuffed penguin mascot for our department. I love that after six years, my church’s college group is starting a Bible study at my school!! I’m SO thrilled for that! And I love my friends, watching them build homes and dreams and families together.

I love these moments and places and people so overwhelmingly much. And I’m so, so grateful for the next two months with them.

But as Pepper and I walked along last Thursday, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit heartbroken and regretful at how lovely the trees looked with their brown-and-gold leaves lit up by the morning sun and how bright the piles of red leaves were as they rustled across the sidewalk. I don’t want to let these beauties go, Lord! Can I just have some time to come back and pick them all up and save these gorgeous leaves?

 

…save the leaves?!?

Right away I started laughing. Autumn leaves aren’t meant to be saved. They’re just not. If I gathered up both arms’ full and took them home with me, they’d be withered and crumbling within a week. Their beauty wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the fact that they’re in transition. They’re literally made to die.

…and maybe, to some extent, so are the circumstances we love in our lives.

I hate letting go of things. I’m terrified of letting the beauty in them go out from my life. I’m grieving that in a lot of ways, I’m not just leaving my life now behind me for eleven months…I’m leaving it behind forever. Like the leaves, I just want to gather up these moments and relationships and places in my arms and keep them with me.

 

But maybe it’s God’s perfect, planned-out grace that we can only hold on to them for a moment.

So that’s what I’m going forward with. I’ll love the leaves, while they’re here. I’ll crunch them under my feet. I’ll jump in them. I’ll grin and thank God when I’m driving and a gust of wind blows a fluttering mass of yellow leaves across the road in front of me. And I’ll love where my life is now too…and then I’ll rest in God’s arms and grace and promise of future life abundant as I watch it go.

Eternity’s still ahead of us, after all.

 

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