Finding Fall . . . Finding True Identity

I discovered a colorful leaf on the grass today. Another yellow and red one caught my eye as I jogged along on the path. Continuing around the pond, I could see a patch of red midst the sea of green leaves.

Fall. Autumn. My favorite season. How I love being surrounded by the beauty of the colors. Yesterday marks the official arrival of autumn, but the full splendor is not all around me yet. I only see glimpses of the beauty.

One here. One there. Like finding a treasure. 
And so it seems with Your touch, Your ways. Sometimes I have to look harder to see Your colors. To see Your presence all around me. To feel it. But still, You are there. All around me.

When we've lived in places around the world where the seasons didn't change, I would go through withdrawals. The crispness in the air. The changing colors - the bold orange, the bright yellow, the magnificent reds. And deep within, I knew, this longing was beyond the changing of the leaves' colors.

Deeper than the unmasking of the green leaves.
Becoming who they really were.
I missed seeing true identity showing forth.

These leaves - they know it too. They have been covered; it's not time to release their real identity, but soon. Did you know that the leaves have had the orange and yellow colors inside them all along. As the season changes, they are no longer producing chlorophyll which had caused them to be green. The reds are so red now because glucose gets trapped.

This. This beautiful display of colors. This is what I'm looking forward to. Me finding You. All around me. And in finding you, seeing you, true identity is revealed in me.

As Michael Card writes in Scribbling in the Sand, "The beauty of God demands a response from us," so I stop and admire and photograph and write.