There is a reason behind why God made the seasons. In fall, when the trees look like they are dying, they are really cutting away the unnecessary fluff that pleases everyone who looks at them and getting down to the act of surviving for another season in their life. They are making the ring of growth for the year complete by pulling their resources closer to themselves. The leaves that fall help to warm their roots for the harsh times upcoming. Sometimes, they may feel a great sense of freedom as they fall and a great sense of loss after they have fallen. Perhaps they feel lighter and more like the true them. Maybe they feel vulnerable and more exposed. Maybe it is just a tree, made from wood and feels nothing. But, if the trees can sing out in praise then I think they can know they are to be used by God. For more than one purpose. Just like we are, dear friend. We can be used as a comforter to our crying child and a voice of reason to a struggling soul. We can use our tongue as a torch, burning up relationships and scorching those around us or we can use it as a calming healing balm to encourage and lift up. We can use our mind to create beautiful songs or to depress ourselves into a useless mess. We can transition and see the leaves falling as natural or we can despair that we are losing the best, most beautiful part of ourselves. We can focus on God or we can focus on ourselves. We can focus on the solution or the problem. Whatever we focus on grows. When my spirit aches, it wants God. When my edges are dry and curled up, being around those in the world makes me shrink. It makes me cry when touched. I am like a leaf, deprived of my nutrients. Still knowing I am a leaf but not having the tree to identify with any longer. I know I am part of something bigger but when I fell from the tree, I lost part of my identity. And with that some of my God given purpose. When I was part of the tree I gave shelter and protection to those near me. I provided coolness in the heat. I stood tall and have others around me who did the same. I became a place of destination. In the season, I did what I was made to do. 

In the next season, is it possible I am still doing what I was made to do? I fell from the tree. I still had life. I was still looking the same as I looked in the tree. Green, lush, unwrinkled. I was still surrounded by others who looked like me. We were still useful, being sat on and photographed and bringing joy. But, after a while, friends started to drift away, some one at at time, some leaving in big waves and gusts, unsettling me before I drift back down to my home once again. It’s as if some force bigger than any of us makes us drift in and out of places and to be around others. Then it starts to get a little cold in the mornings. I feel more disconnected from the source which created me. I wrap my little leaf arms around me. Hugging myself, making myself smaller to deal with my discomfort and to meet my needs independently. Then, I feel ragged around the edges and the very friends who I used to love to be with, those who shared my purpose in life and helped me to accomplish mine, start to feel different. Instead of being a soft gentle companion, they instead feel grating, harsh and rough to be around. If I lean onto them, I can still be reminded of the comfort and sameness we share. But, when I just touch them gently in passing, all I feel is their hard edge. Its the arm they curled around themselves for comfort in the cold morning but I don’t think of that. I just feel the edge and retreat, thinking I must have done something wrong. I must have acted in some way that made them have an edge toward me. Instead of inquiring, asking if their edge is because of me, I make myself smaller so I dont touch them. I start to wrinkle and then I start to crack. I internalize my feelings and thoughts. What I once found comforting, now feels abrasive. Unsettling and intrusive winds now come through my path and pick me up. That is the only time I look out to see others. Oddly, it seems like they are going through the same thing I am experiencing. But this brings me no comfort. I have no desire to comfort them in the battle they are having. I can’t dare to reach out and ask for comfort. For the soft subtle supple parts of them have become dry, brittle, fragile. Broken and torn. Tattered and worn. One day, a huge blow comes from above me. I have a small warning. Things get dark. I can’t see the light. Then all the sudden, a force comes down on me and steps on me with its heavy weight. I can not see. I can not know what is around me, on me, stifling me, changing me. It is as if once this happens, its an inprint on my life. No matter what happens after this moment, I am different. I am changed. It straightens me out but also crushes me. It takes what I was and rearranges it. I feel out of my original shape, parts of me are chipped away. They are gone for ever. I can see them near me. The edges that defined me as a type of person or leaf before are broken away. The remnant is there, the idea still intact but the actuality and functionality changed from the force of the life changing event; 

I look around and I see others, just like me. Broken, disconnected, in pieces. Some are still whole but I am crinkled and wrinkled and starting to change. Even my color is starting to dim. The brightness of my existence is fading.I can feel the wind and cold changing me. I curl up my stem for it is useless now, only a reminder of the tree I am no longer a part of. A stark difference now from how it began. Before it was a part of me, strong yet flexible, allowing me to be a part of something bigger than myself. But now, that same part that used to connect me, seems out of place, as if it doesnt belong here. My soft shape is now hard. My beautiful skin is now crinkly. My vibrant color is now subdued. My strong stem is now twisted. My flexible body is now rigid. Those around me who once flourished lay near me, in the same state I am in. My position has changed from high above everything to as low as I can go. My outlook has gone from anything is possible to there is no way up from here. 

I think things are pretty bad. I am tired. I unwrap myself from my hug and just lay. I am crushed into pieces by heavy pressures, unexpected, just landing on me. I learn to deal with it. These no longer break me as I am flat and already broken. There seems to be a change. The pressures make me soft again. I am broken and can never be the same. But, all of the hard wind and being stepped on have made me soft again. I press down to the ground, stable, unmoving, steady ground. I am no longer uprooted every time there is a wind that comes my way. I feel maybe there is a purpose for me, a different purpose. Maybe my purpose is to cover the roots of what made me who I am. Maybe now that I am broken into pieces I can be used to help make a home for the baby birds of the one who used to sit on me in my youth. Maybe I can be a cover on the earth to keep the worm alive that feeds the baby birds. Maybe I can be raked up to make a child laugh when he jumps onto my broken pieces and he can make me feel useful again. Maybe I can endure the hard things I start to think. Maybe I am strong and tough in ways that I didn’t realize says the leaf. Perhaps I only learned of my strength when I let go of the ideal that I had set in my mind of what strength is. Maybe strength, thought the leaf, is making it through whatever season God puts me in without losing sight of the fact that He is using me for his purpose. IT may seem small or trite to me but when I am broken, it makes Him able to use me. Not for what I thought or maybe for somethings I weill never even understand. But, when the pressures of the world break me and twist me and I cant hardly recognize who  i was or am. Maybe, jut maybe, those are the times when God is not redefining who I am but showing me what my purpose was all along. Maybe God is the tree, unchanging and ever strong but he can use the leaf, the little old me. The one who protects can also use me to protect. The one who covers can also ude me to cover others, THe one who is so strong and big and mighty can use a lot of little leaves to become heaven sent syrup. The warm soothing syrup that comes from the big strongtree. SO sweet and smooth. Yet full of things that give life. The honey from the bee and the syrup from the tree. God knows how to use you and me. It may be a different path than we imagined we would trek. But hahaha, friend But! BUT. 

God knew the plan and the path. He knows every step of the trek. He has placed our feet into the life we are living. He is the vine and we are the branch. He is the tree and we are the leaf. He is the creator and we are the created, He is God and we are not. He is God and we are not. He is God. And we are not. We are created in his image – to think – to speak – to have life. But we are not God. We can speak life. We can create our reality. Don’t waste your time in your head, creating all kinds of what if scenarios. Don’t stay hanging on a tree when it is clearly time for you to fall and move into the next phase of the life that God has created for you. Don’t hold on to the past for the future is there. God is in it, it’s all by design and intent. Are we able to even comprehend that ? There is a God who created the world and everything we have ever seen. He made everyone in our family including us. He knows us before we are even made, down to the last little detail. He made every person with a plan. He knows the end of our story before we take our first breath, The air was made for us to breathe. The creator of everything knows everything. How you are made. What you were made for. What you are made of. And, we have the opportunity to be one with Him. Think about that today as you sit with your thoughts today. Try to fathom the immenseness of God and the power of love. The power of transition and the beauty of being created for a purpose and intent. We are created for many purposes and intents. IF God is transitioning you, stop and take time to realize what a gift this truly is. To be changed into something useful for this season in God’s eternal story.