Dying Beauty

There's nothing about the other seasons that makes me catch my breath with awe like the sight of a tree blazing with autumn color.   In the normal course of things, aging is ugly.  Plants shrivel and become colorless, humans do the same.  Dying isn't so pretty either, whether it be a violent, blood-soaked death, an agonizingly long and  painful one or even an old wrinkled one preceded by loss of youth and vitality .  Yet here we have leaves which have a glory-filled exit, leaves that fling themselves off the tree in a vivid riot of color.   Is there anyone besides God who can make dying things beautiful, who can take the brutal ugliness of death and transform it into a glorious victory?  Here's how Corrie Ten Boom described her sister Betsie right after she died in a concentration camp during World War II:

"For there lay Betsie, her eyes closed as if in sleep, her face full and young.  The care lines, the grief lines, the deep hollows of hunger and disease were simply gone.  In front of me was the Betsie of Haarlem, happy and at peace.  Stronger!  Freer!  This was the Betsie of heaven, bursting with joy and health.  Even her hair was graciously in place as if an angel had ministered to her."

It is a mystery, the mystery of Christ our Champion over Death.

They say aging isn't for wimps.  Don't I know it.  I don't like pain.  I don't like growing in weakness and frailty.  I don't like knowing my brain cells are leaving en masse.  I don't even like the weirdly surreal world in which what I hear and what was actually said are not even mildly related.  I'll be frank: I fear dying.  Yet, autumn  reminds me that God can make dying beautiful.  "Though the outer man is decaying, yet the inner man is renewed day by day."  When I go, may I go out with a blaze of color and with the graceful abandon of the autumn leaf.

Dragonfly

There are few winners of beauty contests in the insect world, but the dragonfly is right up there on stage, definitely about to get the Miss Insect crown on her head.  Surely the squat, ugly and shrill cicadas must be a wee bit jealous when one of these beauties flies by.  The dragonfly is naturally slim, arrayed in elegant and dazzling clothing, has the grace to move quietly around in her little world, and takes care to be seen on only the most lovely flowers.  She's got my vote!   (and yes, I do know that some dragonflies are males.)

Declaring the Glory

We started seeing beautiful puffy white clouds on our way east through South Dakota. Eventually, they took on a darker, more sinister cast, so Kris checked his handy dandy phone for the weather...uh oh, trouble ahead. We were less than 10 miles from our campground destination, but prudence bade us pull over at the rest area and wait this one out.

We got out of the van there and within minutes the heat-filled air had cooled and the wind was whipping our hair around (those of us who have enough hair for whipping). That's when I took the top photo, which doesn't communicate even half of the terrible glory of this storm cloud. Underneath it was a rainbow. The terrible, awesome glory cloud was even then eclipsed in some way by the grace of the covenant rainbow.

When it seemed it had passed, we drove on and soon arrived at the KOA, which bore the blasted look of a place shaken by fury, the ground littered with leaf clusters and hail, windows here and there broken by the wind hurling fistfuls of hailstones at them...

The storm cloud passed on to the north east and from our perspective carried only the fading remnants of color and beauty. But as the sky darkened into evening, we saw lightning in its midst, a constant flicker of light, a filling of light. We watched for a long time, silently contemplating the mystery of God's presence in the sky.