Most people have a favorite season of the year. Winter inspires some, when nature is at rest and
temperatures chill. Falling snow is a remarkable thing, blanketing the world in silence. Some love Spring
and the return of warmth and light to the Northern Hemisphere. Baseball and March Madness add to
the life together. Some love summer and its warmer days and relaxed pace. Gardens and flowers
bloom, as do fruits and vegetables, fishing and the beach. Each season has something to offer.
I love autumn, with its cooler mornings, changing leaves, harvest bounty and something called football,
glorious football. I love everything about fall, from pumpkins and Halloween to festivals and
remarkable colors in the sky and landscape. It is a feast to behold and feel the chill in the evening air.
Autumn brings with it feasts for our senses at church, too. On October 5 we will celebrate World
Communion Day with bread from around the world. It is a day on which we mark our kinship with
Christians of every nation, ethnicity and practice. A hallmark of our faith as Disciples of Christ is the
belief that we have more in common than uncommon. Christ has invited us to eat together, so we have
to figure out a unity that is organic, a given, baked into our life together. We may argue and disagree,
but Christ has already agreed in us that we are one. That is a given, a fact of our faith.
On the last Sunday of October (26th) we will mark All Saints Sunday, a day to remember those who
have gone from this life to life beyond the grave. It has been a difficult year for losses in our place, but it
is a gift to remember those whose lives still mean so much to us. The people we love and have lost are
not really past, but are as present as our memories and stories. We hope for life together again, a
promise of the resurrection.
It is too easy to get caught up in our day-to-day schedules, the week-to-week grind of events that can
cause our lives to become shallow and thin and exhausting. We look up from the busyness and Spring
has become Fall; years, then decades have passed. My mother would sing me to sleep with a wonderful
song from back in her day:
Turn around and you’re tiny, turn around and you’re grown
Turn around and you’re a young wife/husband with babes of your own.
I sang that to my own children when they were tiny and now, they are grown. Where did the time go?
Pay attention to the days and hours and minutes. Celebrate the connection with people around the
world and beyond the grave. We are people whose lives are bigger and deeper than today’s issues and
problems. Come and see…. Peace, Chris