Letting Go

There’s a meme that’s appeared in my Facebook feed a couple of times this fall – a picture of autumn leaves and the words ‘the trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.’

Creation is often our teacher, pointing us toward God and reminding us of how our lives are intertwined with others. The Psalmist proclaims, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God.’ Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins writes, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ And Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes that the first man ‘understood that all the knowledge he needed in order to live was present in the land. His role was not control or change the world as a human, but learn from the world how to be human.’ Creation is often our teacher, revealing God and ourselves to us.

And something in me has been resistant to the lessons of autumn this year, the lessons of ‘how lovely it is to let things go,’ the lessons of surrender. Maybe it’s the ways the season reminds me of my mortality, maybe it’s dreading the darkness and cold of winter. Maybe it’s that continuing to live with so many uncertainties makes surrender, letting go, feel harder than ever and not at all lovely. I’m not even sure what it is I am resisting letting go of . . . maybe it’s my ideas of what I should be able to do, who I think I should be. Maybe it’s my hopes and fears for my kids, for our neighborhood, for our church. So many things need to be held loosely these days – big things and small things. Maybe its that in what feels like a long season of loss, it’s hard to let go.

Last week we had some time with friends up north, near Houghton Lake. The weather was cold and dreary, but we hiked anyway and on one of our hikes, our friend challenged our family to find leaves in every color of the rainbow and gather them and we’d have a rainbow contest at the next trail marker. There was some resistance to the idea, but soon we were all busily collecting leaves and creating our rainbows. And it got me thinking about Noah and the rainbow and how the sign of God’s promise was/is a sign that comes with rain and storms and it isn’t always visible. And yet there are signs of God’s faithfulness everywhere once we begin looking for them. The changing of seasons, the sunrise each morning, our daily bread.

I’ve been looking for signs of God’s faithfulness this week, trying to gather them up like we gathered our leaf rainbows. Here are a few I’ve noticed: the drop-off line for Eastminster preschool when I walk the dog in the morning, and the school buses driving through the neighborhood; kids coming in and out of church after school for Learning Cafe; elders and deacons meeting and praying in person for the needs of the church and the community; the thick frost on the grass, and the annual turning on of the boiler at church; our kids’ eager excitement about making costumes for Halloween.

My spiritual director gently reminded me this week that fall is a transition – it’s about letting go but it’s also about letting come. And maybe instead of resisting the lessons of autumn about letting go I can keep watching for signs of God’s faithfulness in this season of change.