Well, it’s officially fall. When I walked out of the house the other day, I noticed that half of the leaves were gone from the birch trees in our front yard. That made me stop for awhile since I hadn’t taken the time to enjoy the brilliant yellow that they had turned. One of my favourite fall memories as a kid is a drive that took us to a farm where they grew mums…there were rows and rows of brilliant colours. The maple tree that I see from my office has already turned deep red and lost many of its leaves. That maple tree is like a clock to me; reminding me of Ecclesiastes 3 that there is a time for everything.
There comes a time in every man’s life when he takes stock of where he is and where he thought he would be. Last week when I turned 55, it was one of those days for me. It seems like it was only yesterday when I turned 40 and I thought about how quickly time slips by. I thought about my mother passing away at 67 and wondered how I would make the best of 12 years if that’s all the time I had left. This summer I finished reading a book about loss and it talked about exactly that…children wonder if they will die at the same age as their parents. That thought profoundly affects children whose parents die young because they worry about it so much, sometimes without understanding what’s going on inside their minds.
According to the television commercials that I seen years ago about Freedom 55, I should have been sailing the Pacific with Gail in my arms, sipping a cup of coffee. Instead, I had my grandsons for the night sleeping on a huge makeshift bed (and sometimes trampoline) in the basement. Lucas recently went shopping and got a “button shirt”, a tie, a vest and grey pants that match Papa’s. When he got dressed up for church this week, he was beaming from ear to ear.
Yup, I’m exactly where I want to be!
