“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives…” – Colossians 1:9

When I looked at my smartphone weather app and saw several days of rain and wind forecast I knew it was time to act. So I grabbed my camera and took a thirty-minute hike around the immediate neighborhood.

It’s a good thing I did, because many of those trees have already emptied their leaves onto the sidewalk.

I wandered less than a quarter mile in two directions, but there was enough color on display to generate some really great photos.

It really is a blessing to live in this idyllic neighborhood, in this lovely town, in this beautiful state.

In this often contentious, troubled world, populated with so many lost and broken souls, God unerringly points us back to goodness and grace. “There is a season,” God’s voice counsels, and then The Creator illustrates that truth with a blanket of spectacular color before easing the world into winter, the time when all the growing and strengthening goes on in the background and underneath, largely unseen.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end… – Ecclesiasts 3:11

Enjoy these fall colors, generously splashed across our neighborhood just before this rain came in. Sometimes it takes light to reveal the color – maybe as if color is as much the product of the light as it is intrinsic?

So let’s all choose to walk in the light – where our true colors are drawn out by The One who calls all life into being. – DEREK