Finding Power Amidst Change

Every year on a mid-September morning, I sit down at the kitchen table and realize that it has happened: the ash tree has changed colors. I wonder how I have missed it again—that slow fade from green to yellow, indicating that fall wouldn’t let me hold onto summer anymore.

In the morning light, the tree looks like it is on fire. I open the door to our deck and feel the chilly drop in temperature before sitting back down at the table and diving into my bowl of cereal.

I chomp down hard on the pieces.

I want it back—all those days of water fights, bicycle races, chalk drawings, and snow cone sales. I want the nights of stargazing on my front lawn and reading in my bed when everyone else was asleep.

Fall means change. It means layers of clothes and loads of homework, different teachers and new schools. Some of this change is good—needed even. So, as days become shorter, the nights longer, I gradually forget about summer and begin looking forward to apple cider, ski days, and Christmas lights. And it is somehow okay that summer is gone.

Our lives are full of change, but one constant is our ability to choose how we deal with change. In his 2003 devotional address, Randall W. Boothe counsels:

Have you noticed how the seasons of our lives move forward in a never-ending stream? I have been fascinated—sometimes surprised, but almost always invigorated—by the changes I have experienced so far in the seasons of my life. Our personal choices are different as we pass through each new season. . . . Through the spring, summer, fall, and winter of our life, one thing remains constant: we are free to choose. . . . I am convinced that there is really only one choice that we must make, and that choice is Jesus Christ. When we choose Him, everything else will naturally follow. 

Whether we are itching to get on the road and begin a new journey or struggling to hold onto the way things were, we can decide how we will react to our circumstances by deciding to choose Christ. No matter the season of our lives and regardless of our age and situation, we are not powerless in the face of time. If our choices focus first on Christ, then we will find that the winters of our lives can contain bright moments that make it okay that summer has passed for now.

—Danielle Christensen, BYU Magazine intern