by Ashley Perez
My idea of God and his faithfulness has drastically changed in the span of a few short weeks and it’s all because of the fall. I’ve lived the majority of my life in San Diego, California where we’ve been blessed with a climate that doesn’t really fluctuate at all. Essentially it’s 70 and sunny all year long, except for the few short weeks of winter where we’ve been known to dawn a scarf or two, more for fashion than anything else.
However as some of you know I haven’t been living in California for the past eight months, instead I’ve been teaching English in Daegu, South Korea, thousands of miles away from my sunny paradise. And though there are many lessons I’ve learned since coming to live in South Korea, perhaps the most drastic one has come with the changing of the leaves.
In San Diego we have one season, summer. But here in Daegu we have them all, which to me is nothing short of incredible. In the winter the trees are bare as bone picked clean by the cold bite of December, and rather inexplicably the trees are green again and the most delicate color of pink fills the sky as the Cherry Blossoms come into bloom. Then just like that, the blossoms leave their branches and a lush green blanket of leaves takes its place for the summer. And now that October is here, a most magical thing is happening as the leaves turn shades of red, yellow, and orange that I thought were reserved only for sunsets. God is everywhere, and here’s why it feels like the first time I’ve experienced his faithfulness.
My whole life I’ve grown up around verses like Ecclesiastes 3:1, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven” or Psalms 27:14, “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” Wait, they say. God is faithful, he will come through and just as the seasons change so there is a time for the Lord’s plans for you. But the seasons never changed, summer was always summer, and so I didn’t really understand the inevitability of God’s faithfulness.
Watching the season change from winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, I now understand something about God I never did before. God’s goodness is inevitable, his faithfulness unstoppable, just like the changing of the seasons. Being here there are times when I believed the seasons wouldn’t change. In the middle of humid summer days, I couldn’t imagine a time where I’d be watching the leaves fall while wearing layers to work again, and yet here I am. Fall came, and so will God. The beauty of the seasons is that even when we doubt, they still come, and just as God made the seasons to come forth in their own time, so he designed our lives.
My favorite bible verse is Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time”. As a girl who has struggled to feel valuable and beautiful, this verse has come to mean everything to me because it’s God’s promise that I too am beautiful, and that his plans for me are inevitable, it’s simply a matter of time.
Now I get it, I finally understand the inevitability of it all. God’s promises are not empty words or pretty rhetoric; they are real in both word and deed. When God says there is a season for everything under the sun that includes you. You are part of God’s plans and promises in the same way the seasons are, which makes waiting in God a simple matter of timing.
