Fall is here along with the lovely quotes that remind us of its power to show beauty in dying, magnificence in letting go, colors in endings.
But what about when the color doesn’t come?
This fall seems to be more brown than anything else. The weather this summer was certainly erratic enough to cause a loss of fall charm, and isn’t that how seasons go?
One season’s hard steals the joy from the next.
I feel this with trauma, the traumatic season over and a joyful one present, and yet the colors of today dim with the dinge of previous pain.
The colors of today dim with the dinge of previous pain.
Last year I took a variety of fall pictures, trying to capture the number of colors and crisp beauty unfolding as the leaves died, fell, and brought beauty to eyes all around. It was our first fall as a family in our northeastern state, and I couldn’t believe how beautiful the trees were. I collected photographs like it was medicine. And maybe it was?
In an internal season of hard and the middle of a long interrupted night of struggle, I smacked my phone on the counter and watched the screen die, and with it all my fall photos be lost.
Ashamed, filled with regret, wrought with pain, I detested my choice and felt my consequences.
Next year I’ll take more again.
But seasons don’t work like that. You can’t throw beauty away and guarantee another chance. This fall has produced zero pictures of colored loveliness, and my eyes are filled with brown and already-empty trees instead.
Last night, my husband and I on a date night, the waitress joked about our requesting a different table other than the one by the kitchen we were placed at. “Maybe she wants to tell you she’s pregnant,” she laughs to my husband.
Does she know she just drove a knife through my heart? My stomach drops, appetite lost, trauma triggered.
Does she know tomorrow’s our first lost baby’s due date anniversary?
Does she know the severity of such a statement, the reality of my barrenness and the journey that brought me to where this can never be a laughing matter?
Of course she doesn’t, and I dream of a world where eventually enough awareness has been created to know too many women’s pain makes pregnancy jokes taboo.
Too much drought and too much rain steals the next season’s color.
Too much drought and too much rain steals the next season’s color.
Today we remember our first hope baby’s due date, and I remember seasons of death and of letting go where there’s no signs to show us beauty in it, no colorful reminders of hope, no evidence of goodness in endings.
And what do we do in these seasons, these seasons that don’t fit the mold, don’t hold us gently, don’t advertise hope and God’s hand?
I guess this is where faith solidifies, and we cling to the hope in the color of brown itself, knowing that “hope that is seen is not hope” (Romans 8:24-26). Knowing that reds and golds show us hope but brown gives us something better, it brings out our hope and let’s us see without seeing.
It’s difficult, it’s painful, it’s downright wrenching to go through seasons where nothing beautiful can be seen but by faith we see the colors smothered and believe they’ll be bright again someday.
When death doesn’t look pretty and we’re not given tangible reminders of how good it is to let go…
When cancer, infertility, droughts and floods, loved ones dying and mental health failing all scream at us to despair and see only the brown…
When cute sayings of color tempt us to bitterness…
We remember with Saint Chrysostom, “It is not so much sin that plunges us into disaster, as rather despair.”
(From Theology of Hope by Jürgen Moltmann)
So fellow fall-navigator, when everything’s brown and the normal signs of God’s hand are hidden, cling to hope. Remembering that true hope is unseen.