Thank you for my life

We came, we laughed, we cried. We ate.

We did Thanksgiving twice. Up at the cottage on Saturday, my wife's family gathered, and we ate a huge turkey dinner which one of my sisters in law had spent a week preparing. Yesterday, we went to my brother's, and did it all over again. We worked on outdoorsy things at the cottage. At my brother's, I worked with my father on his book. This morning we are going to breakfast with my parents and my brother, before my folks leave town.

The leaves peaked this weekend, and I took about 40 pictures of red, orange, and yellow leaves. I'll post some of them soon. The flaming red maples and bright orange oaks made the forests look like they were on fire. I could not help but notice that, for the trees, it is at the ending of things that they bring out their truest beauty. In summer, every tree looks the same - the oaks, the maples, the poplars are all just brown trunks that run up into huge seas of green. But before they end, each one gets to stand out and be something so completely distinct from all others, that you could never mistake it for another, and never see its like again.

So it is with our lives. At some point, what differentiates us from everyone else comes to the fore, and makes us special to everyone around us. And just as God gives us brightly coloured trees to remind us that his beauty is found at all times, even especially as the days grow dark and grey, he gives us our individuality, so that we may make our mark in the world. And our individuality is indeed a great gift, because do we not all long to make a mark in the world? Do we not all want to be there to cheer for others when their moment is at hand?

We have only moments for this. There is not a second to waste. We want to be fully awake when our moment comes, so that we know it and revel in it when we are in it, rather than reflect bitterly years on that there it was, and we did not see it. For life is a short summer, and then fall must come.

In the seas of flaming red and orange that cover the hills in Lanark county, life prepares to sleep. A deep November darkness will soon cover everything. But the white snow that follows it will brighten the woods, and the sun will begin anew its ascent to summer. Even in the dark, life prepares to awake from its slumber. Just as one day, we will awake from ours.