The Red-Green Show

The season’s started.  Red is starting to soak through the green.  How is it that overnight, the leaves could all be dipped and saturated in a completely new colour?  It’s a radical turning around – running from the active growing summer, about-face into autumn. 

There are explosions of vibrant, fiery colours around me: see that one, golden orange yellow tree, standing in glorious contrast to the solid blue sky?  It embraces change, unlike those still transforming around it.

I get too focused on the leaves falling off the trees, day falling into night earlier and earlier, lives falling into sometimes daunting and never ending routine.  In the rustling, indecisive wind, I need to be reminded to be still

and look around. 

I feel way too abstract: a compilation of colours and curves and emotion against a backdrop of right angles, hard lines, and a pallet of grey and gray that is in its own way beautiful. Too often I rush past it, a number, somewhere in the middle of black and white, busses and cars and trucks and students racing making noise that is grey and gray.   Need      focused      forced      mode    think    and see the softness in the spectrum of stone and sweeping shadows and swift motion that speak to the sweet soul of the city, and cover the sour that seems to stick with me.

Trying to sort out everything that needs to be done and needs to be learned for class is exhausting.  There are days when I feel like giving up.  The mountain of homework seems too big.  My schedule is too tight.  Maybe it’s all just too fast for me? Maybe this isn’t what I was cut for, when those scissors and hands that planned all time chose my colours and textures and sewed me together in my mother’s womb.

I arrive at school and the kids ask me if I can teach their class instead of the sub who found out this morning that she’d be filling in for the day.  And in that moment, I look into their eyes and think to myself....how I could want to do anything else?  It’s the way they wonder as they soak up my answers, and it’s the way they are excited to show me how their self-portraits are coming along.

There is this pride in their school and in their accomplishments, this curiosity and unsureness in their dreams, this need for attention that makes me want to dump a giant bucket of love on them, that they would taste and see the goodness of their creator.  

And so I ponder how to see beauty in the city.  How to see calm.  How to feel home.   I walk into the school, or into my apartment building, and I realize that when I see the city through their eyes, and through the names I can’t pronounce, and through the way their colourful hijabs fall and fold around their necks – the “rightness” of place in these moments washes over me and draws me into a gentle current, pulling me towards peace. 

God is showing up this season in surprising, warm, intense, solid, lovely red.  Red Like the leaves changing on the trees, he’s appearing in the opposite colours of the season I’ve come through.  He’s showing up in freshly picked apples, clasped hands, and answered prayers. He’s showing up in a flow that is completely natural for Him, and yet stands in stark contrast to the season I’ve become accustomed to. 

The process is phenomenal.  I watch as the city changes colours. I tread carefully as I feel crunching leaves and soft ground beneath my feet.  And despite all the change, the hurdles, the doubts and the fears that sometimes take hold of me,

I’m happy.  And I’m happy to run with Him, wind in my hair, hand in His hand, knowing He’ll only choose the best path.