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.