Have You Noticed?

Have you noticed? I know you have. The leaves. The maples all red and gold while the pin oaks are still mostly green. It’s almost trite to talk about the glory of the fall, but sometimes calling something trite is just cynicism. And being cynical just shields me from wonder. I don’t think we can make too much of the beauty of the world outside our doors.

If you stare up at the impossibly large clouds forming shapes, ephemeral in the breeze. We have no sense of scale for how large they are, sometimes weighing a million pounds, and yet floating in the air. We cannot make too much of that.

Or carry your magnifying glass outside. I remember my grandaddy holding a magnifying glass up to the newspaper so he could see how his stocks were doing. Red sweater, in the recliner, seeing if he’d made a good bet or not. Carry that magnifying glass outside and look between the blades of grass. Even if you don’t see an ant at work, you’ll notice the cut-glass shape of the dirt, the nearly microscopic pebble worn off a mountain or an ancient seabed. We can’t make too much of that.

Somewhere in between all that, lies the ginkgo. When I first came to Christ Church, there was the beautiful gingko tree just outside the doors of the church. I was here in late October and only a few of her leaves were turning toward their molten gold display. By the time I started in February, she looked like all the other trees - dead, sticks, brown, waiting.

But I saw the pictures and I heard the stories and I had my own love of those trees. One stands just outside the doors of my last church too. I can go back in my camera roll and I have at least one picture of that tree, every year in November or early December. The leaves change a bit later in west Georgia.

For more than a year, my walk from the parking lot to my office was dominated by the Commons. The fence, the site work, the construction, and finally the building itself. But lately I have been noticing something else.

On the pavement, between the Commons and the office, I’ll see a little yellow ginkgo leaf. I’ll see a flame gold tree, barely taller than me up between one parking lot and the next. And I am reminded of all the things that are beautiful but don’t last forever.

I know it’s trite to say, but I don’t want to shield myself from wonder. I want to give myself to the world. I want to show up and be in one place at a time: the gorgeous leaves, the dead of winter, the green shoots of spring, and even the sweat of summer. The pulpit, the altar, the funeral meeting, and even the staff development.

God is in it all. God is still in that grassy place where there used to be a ginkgo over next to the church. God is in the little trees planted after all the construction. In the big and little moments of each of our lives. In this moment, somehow in these words. It’s all I can do to trust it, and give myself to it, and hope for it. That’s my faith.

God is here.

Have you noticed?