As the Leaves Turn
As a born and raised Californian, I’m anticipating my first true winter with both excitement and dread. I’m looking forward to the first snowfall and waking up to a landscape blanketed in white (though people tell me New York snow quickly turns into a gray, city-steeped sludge). We haven’t reached winter yet. But each morning, as I look out from my window and see the tree leaves turn red and yellow before falling, I’m reminded of the unmistakable passage of time. It isn’t summer anymore. Somewhere between sticky August and midterm season, summer has slipped away.
The thing about seasons, though, is that we will have another summer and another autumn next year. That’s just how the earth works: around the sun we go for another year. The leaves fall, decompose, disintegrate, recombine into new configurations of cellulose. And though there is also a cyclic nature to our lives, you and I will be changed people by next year. We will eventually graduate and move on to a different phase of life, never to return. The clock does not pause. To be human is to be susceptible to time.
When all we know is flux, it is surprising and strange that God does not change. Yet his lack of change—in other words, his immutability—is a solid rock of comfort in turbulence and uncertainty. We long for friends consistently loyal, for professors who always grade fairly, for parents invariably empathetic. These are fantasies. Everyone, even those who love you most, will fail you in one way or another, intentionally or not. But the Lord has promised us that he does not change, for he is not like us. His promises are true because he is eternally, immutably faithful.
Moving far from home for the first time has shown me how much I dislike change. Change, however, is unavoidable. I couldn’t be a high schooler forever. And even though I’ve started to acclimate to college life, I won’t be in college forever, either. This is why God’s promise to be our refuge is so sweet: he is the only unchanging, unfading place we can rest in. Therefore, as the psalmist says, “we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea” (Psalm 46:2).
When your world is falling apart at its seams—when stress culture gets to you, when you pull an all-nighter, when loneliness creeps in, when the future seems unsteady—our heavenly Father is the same. His compassion, faithfulness, and attentiveness to his children never waver.
In the turning of tree leaves, I am reminded that I am subject, like the rest of creation, to the silent flow of time. I am also reminded that for each individual leaf, God has decreed its lifespan, painted its hue, and knows it as it falls. It is much the same for me: time moves swiftly, in unexpected turns, but I find rest in the unchanging providence of my God.
Ashley Kim is a freshman in Columbia College majoring in English.