Hello,

It’s that time again—the time when there’s a seismic shift not only in our lives as we go back to work or school, but in nature itself, as the full bloom of summer fades into the crisp and cloudy days of fall. I live in Los Angeles, so the changes are minimal here and leave me longing for a greater display of the season’s changing, instead of the minor tweaks to the external aesthetic in which I live, but I’ll take what I can get. And yesterday I reveled in a slightly melancholy sky, which had me reflecting on the reality and inevitability of “change,” not only in the physical reality around me, but my own life.

I think many of us, myself included, have believed that life should look like one thing, expecting and hoping our “nows” to remain constant. But life changes and grows, often to our dismay. Like grasping at the wind, we long for constancy and secretly believe that’s how it should be. We want to stay young forever, for our children to not grow up, to never leave our home, to always be financially stable. And while some beautiful things are lifelong, most circumstances in life change outside of our control over them. As I gaze at nature and the system God has designed us to live in, the changing of seasons isn’t something that’s gone wrong, but a design element created by God for good. In both physical creation and our life circumstances, seasons are a good and beautiful thing that keeps us forever moving forward in the stories we are telling. God never intended for us to live our entire lives in one chapter, but instead to continue turning the page to discover what he’s written on the next page, in a new chapter.

Change can be difficult. Recently, many changes have occurred in my life, many of them uncomfortable, leaving me with the uneasy task of facing the “unknown.” But I believe God is good and that venturing into the unknown, next chapter and season of my life will be a beautiful turn of the page that will usher me into the next part of the story He has for me to tell. I hope that whatever new season your life is ushering you towards, you can take comfort and find hope that great things await you in it, if only you take hold of the confidence in knowing that as long as you do it with God, you’ll never walk alone.

- Nathan