A Reason for the Season

I can tell that the season is starting to change. Literally, I can feel it in my body. The days are getting shorter yet feeling longer than before. The temperature is falling. Soon leafs will be too. Autumn is in the air. I wonder what that means for me.

For so many years now my life has cycled in a pattern with the four seasons. Since high school autumn has been the season in which I have been faced with a serious question or challenge. It is in this season that I have done like the trees and let go of old things so that I could sustain myself and prepare for new growth. There was the autumn in which folks disappointed me, school was not an option. There was the autumn in which I was chosen to stand in the middle for the good of the order. The autumn when I was taught and then asked to teach in unreasonable circumstances that there are times when must go along to get along. The autumn in which I learned the meaning of grace and endurance and at the end of that season I was so duly rewarded. But it took sleepless nights, hard work and prayer to get there. Examples are abundant. Autumn is upon us.

I recall two years ago on my birthday, September 26 I was sitting down and as easy as a baby coos I looked across a great hall into the eyes of a woman and said to myself that that she would deliver the next great question, the next challenge. Nearly one month later she called me into a room and she did. Perhaps, because my spirit had prepared me I was not so taken aback. I rose to the occasion, answered the question and because of a power greater than myself stood in victory. That is the thing. I believe that this cycle I go through is all done under the watchful eye and guiding hand of God. It is part of his plan. I couldn’t create one so perfect.

This year, I have had a grumbling in my belly, one that says that I will be forced to choose between two ideas. Neither of them is right or wrong. It is simply one choice, one choice that could affect the rest of my life. It is that time.