For Everything There is a Season

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”

- Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

If you followed our visit to the Observatory last April, you’ll have seen that seasons of the year come about because of the tilt of the Earth as it rotates around the sun each year. But that doesn’t explain everything we see during the changing seasons.

One of the most well known symbols of seasonal change is the bright red colors in the leaves of deciduous trees (trees with leaves) each Fall.

The chemicals that make the bright colors in Fall leaves were always there but were dominated by the green chlorophyll of Spring and Summer. In the Fall, the energy it takes for the plants to stay green moves to providing sugars to the seeds that will propagate new growth. These enriched seeds are often what we harvest in the Fall or that are sown to flower next Spring.

There’s something quintessentially Christian about an endless cycle that has beautiful beginnings born of its end and a beautiful end latent within that same beginning.