Gray Hairs in Autumn

“Even to your old age and gray hairs I am the One, I am the One who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.”

Isaiah 46:4

I long to grow old and cherish moments, not as I ought, but as I can. I long to enter into every season with appreciation, joy, and acceptance of the unknown things; unknown deep things that will bring me to myself, to God, and to others.

Autumn is my final crucible of time. It is not that I am afraid of death. With death come blazing beauty, color, and a witness of humility  and divine yielding in the falling leaves that is second only to Christ in the garden, in the courtyard, on the cross.

It is the decomposing, muddy, wet, cold and smelly mass that come after the initial willingness to fall. The three days. The forty days. The forty years.

I hate waiting for the snow to fall and cover things over. I hate waiting for the spring to come and bring growth again. I hate waiting in the shit-smell of decomposing life.

This is the Body of Christ. No one wants to be the colon of Christ. “I would rather be your heart, your head, your eyes, your hands!”

But oh the glory of Autumn! Oh the glory of the blazing leaves that all together declare, “Yes, Lord, let us fall as you have us fall!”

Oh God, make me the blazing leaf of Autumn! Must I pass through this? Yes, we all must. Some more than others.

And I believe that on that night in the garden, the olive leaves themselves fell to pad the knees of our tormented Lord and to catch the bloody tears that would mix with the anointing oil to redeem us the next morning.

So I must grit my teeth and though I know that Christ calls me to his heart, I am now his appendix, the small, misunderstood, seemingly meaningless problem-child of human anatomy. And as I wait to be something other than I am I remain where I have been asked to be; in both the hope and patient tormented waiting for what God has promised to reveal and make real.