Beauty of Fall

Twice a year my work hosts a "Prayer and Fasting" day at a local arboretum.  It's a chance for us to get away from the craziness of the office and decompress a little.  We spend most of the day in solitude, with 5 hours spent wandering the grounds praying, reflecting, and reading.  It was during one of these times a couple of weeks ago, that I was struck in a new way by the beauty surrounding me.  The trees were on the cusp of beginning to change colors for the fall.  It was a gorgeously sunny day with temps in the 70s.  I was walking through a forest, surrounded by God's creation with no one else in sight.  I found myself thinking about how immensely pretty everything was.  Then, I thought to myself, "why?" "Why did God create things to be beautiful?" Instead of the deep greens and rustic browns, I could be looking at gray and black.  Everything could be one color of "blah" and I wouldn't know any different.  If I grew up with monochrome surroundings, a world of colorless nothing, then that would be my "familiar."  Yet, instead, I have been given beauty and richness, and am therefore able to differentiate between the mundane and the extravagant.  I began to be so appreciative of not just of the beauty that is in front of me, but also the beauty that will be.   If I think things are so wonderful now, what  will they look like when all things are renewed?  This "beautiful" world we are surrounded carries with it the effects of sin and brokenness. The Bible tells us that creation groans for it's own restoration.  The beauty I see now is but a mere reflection, a fleeting shadow, of the beauty that is to come.

So, when you see a tree in the splendor of its fall colors, sparkling in the sunlight, take a moment to thank God--not just for the beauty that it is, but the beauty that is to come when all things are redeemed and restored.

Romans 8: 20-23:  For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.