Trust Fall

Pastor’s Epistle—October 2022

I often feel guilty, as a dog owner, for not taking our brace of hounds on evening walks as regularly as I might like. Thus when we do get out, I tend to wind them through town and country, field and forest, over hill and dale. What we lack in frequency, we attempt to make up in sheer distance travelled. This assuages my conscience somewhat.

Oftentimes I walk alone, and that’s just fine by me. I have some excellent noise-cancelling headphones and a long backlog of audiobooks on which to catch up. But sometimes one or two of our kids will come along, should they be in the mood for a captive audience. And this too I enjoy. It’s nice not having a screen between us.

Autumn, of course, is the best time for walks, neither too warm nor too cool. The scents and sights of the season invigorate the soul: woodsmoke, fiery trees, crispy red leaves dancing down the street. And I always smile to see what sorts of Halloween decorations our extended neighbors display. Be they subtle or garish, they never fail to raise spirits.

On one recent early autumnal constitutional, our youngest took a dog and regaled me with tales of the fourth grade as she and I meandered down the appropriately named Walker Road. Birches were turning yellow, the maples a bolder red. One quaking aspen shivered a small flurry of tiny leaves about our path. And unbidden, my daughter says:

“Isn’t it wonderful that the leaves trust the tree enough to let go?”

She’s a clever little thing, and I rather liked her turn of phrase, so I asked her to elaborate. The tree, she said, is like God; and we are the leaves. We trust God enough to let go, to fall without fear, confident that we, like leaves, will grow afresh in spring. Ah, thought I, this will surely come in handy for some sermon down the line.

Full disclosure: I have, in the past, been accused of putting my own words into the mouths of my children for the purposes of anecdote. I can say, with relative confidence, that I’m not in the habit of doing such things. I may edit at times for brevity or clarity—particularly to emphasize the humor present in a given situation—but our kids speak for themselves, and they say the darnedest things.

I had never thought of falling leaves as a sign of childlike trust; of beauty, certainly, but not an act of faith. Medieval Christians, however, would’ve loved it. They interpreted the natural world through a moralistic lens: in describing peacocks, for example, they would emphasize the vanity of the bird, and how it stood for us as a cautionary tale of pride.

Now every time I see the autumn leaves, in addition to hearing my Mother’s annual phrase—“There go the leaves dancing down the street!”—I’ll hear my daughter’s simple, soulful observation: they trust the tree enough to let go. They know that they’ll rise again.

In Jesus. Amen.