We are packaging fall like a gift--wrapped in sliced apples, topped with fall bouquets of brown and orange, handled with care and spiced candles. We are living fall over crisp frosted grass in the morning and hung breath in the evening. The harvest skies at night are dark and light, stars at their brightest against the blackest set. Fresh fruit wanes at the co-op with an influx of sweet potatoes, carrots, and their other root relatives. I am suddenly hungry for peaches and fresh berries and we've hardly just bid adieu.

Is it really this time of the year already?

I have to remind myself to breathe sometimes because I'm so prone to grasping at the remnants of everything I deem good: summer and fall included. I have to remind myself to enjoy today because tomorrow will be cold and snowy. I have to mentally grasp how a day that's so short between dawn and dusk can seem so very, very long. I have to hibernate and still be fully alive.

How can we fill a life so teetering on the edge of everything? I think about that a lot recently. How can I be most fully the reflection of Him, most fully the image of Him, bring heaven to here--live it fully, intentionally? How can we be anxious for nothing and in everything give thanks, knowing that it's the will of Him and at the very same time know: no, it's not!

It wasn't designed to be like this, this shadow of turning, this variation on death and dying, this waning and waxing of life and hope and redemption. It was meant to be eternal fresh fruit, peaches and berries with no seasonal lack. An overabundance of good and all the time. How can the will of Him be brokenness and thanksgiving in one rushed breath?

I believe, help my unbelief.
Already/Not yet.
I must decrease, He must increase.

We understand life, like Kierkegaard said, we live it forward, but understand it backward. It is a paradox, this juxtaposition of terms: Christianity is a game and we all win when it seems that we all lose. Spring comes again, but only because we lived fully through winter, breathed out and in during fall and gathered in the summer abundance. We understand it backwards--see the pieces and fit together mentally what once came naturally.

I don't know how this conundrum works, but I know this: He is the great Redeemer. He takes all the seasons and fits them together into one seamless string of 365 days, into 24 hour segments, into moments and seconds, into sunrises and full moons, root vegetables and fruit trees, hibernation and procreation. He takes the foolish things and confounds the wise.

He reconciles the opposing, resolves the division, and redeems the time (and everything else) in between.