The Blessing of Delay

a devotional for autumn

Thank you for joining us! Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

On Wednesday, Adrian Conway weighed in on our discussion about Impermanence with this comment:

Just published a short story covering some of these themes, SE. Without irreverence, I think it’s about getting naked. The deciduous trees speak to me of Job 1:21-22. It was shame that made us hide in clothes (Gen 3:11) and they’re obviously a metaphor for the parts of our hearts we foolishly think we can hide from God. I think life is a peeling off. Layer after layer. Willing or otherwise.

Beautifully said! I’m so glad Adrian added this insight, and the powerful short story he wrote and referenced, called The Five Seasons, can be found here!

If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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a fragrant pile
of apple peels
grows
beside the cutting board

as each offering joins
the gathering
of providential fruit:

the cider
the sauce
the jar-full, dried;

with each harvest
a weight is lifted
from the arms of the tree
and becomes our burden to bear,

a burden of grace,
heavy with meaning
yet weightless, 
buoyant, 

carrying us over the tide of winter

and out, out
to a season
yet
unwritten. 

This is a late, late season. In a typical year, the rains come in late September and become a frequent visitor by mid-October. Our average first frost appears around the 17th of the month, and by Hallowe’en, everything is gray and wet.

Trick-or-treating with a raincoat over your costume is reasonably usual, here.

But this year is different. I can recall sunny, unseasonably warm Octobers in the past, wearing short sleeves to the pumpkin patch, but this is the first time I’ve watched it unfold as a gardener and a student of the land around me. Our days have been mild, warm, and dry, with chilly mornings draped in fog. Is our first frost truly one week away? Seems unlikely.

I confess; while the earth needs a good soaking that only the rains of October can provide (and the forecast says they are coming in a few weeks), I am not too sorry for the lateness of the season. I have pumpkins and summer squash only now arriving after winter spilled all the way into June and stunted everything. I have apples sweetening slowly, giving me time to squirrel away the tarter ones—my favorites—into the refrigerator to last until next summer. Chamomile and calendula are still flowering, our fall crops are still sprouting, rising.

And the beasts we share this land with can’t seem to believe their luck, either. A variety of birds cover every inch of the lawn and shrubbery in the misty mornings, taking advantage of the warmth to snag as many seeds and bugs and berries as they can find. The bits of scat we find around the property, usually the only signs we see of larger predators, are full of blackberry remnants.

As I stand at the kitchen counter, busily slicing apples onto the dehydrator or grating zucchini or freezing blackberries, I feel that same sense of providential relief that I hear in the song of the birds on the lawn. What luck! Another warm day! Another day to make ready, to prepare! What a gift! What an unearned grace!

It can be easy to grieve a season that arrives late. But a season truly isn’t over until it’s over. Sometimes it’s merely delayed. Sometimes abundance is coming, we just need a bit more patience, a bit more trust.

Soon enough the garden will sleep and the time we prepared for will arrive. Until then, we make use of every gifted moment, every blessing that delay affords us.

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