Autumn Leads to Spring

Hello, dear friends.

It’s that time of the year. A time when leaves start changing—green to yellow to orange—before drifting slowly to the ground, leaving a blanket of color. The weather begins to change—first the mornings a little cooler—you might grab a jacket or sweater.

Then the mornings become crisp, with bountiful sunny days that don’t warm up quite like you’d expect, but you don’t mind. The milder days bring a sweet relief from the hot, humid summer days, and a bridge into the frosty, snowy days of winter. Autumn is a beautiful, magical time.

At least it is where I come from.

Realistically, where I live now, by the sea, the days get cooler little by little, never bottoming out the same way that they do in Minnesota. Rather than sunny, crisp days, the autumn here brings grey, rainy mornings, and sometimes full days. The leaves do change, but they don’t change as rapidly or as totally as they do in my home state, so the ground cover is never quite the same.

On the coast, one season is a slightly different shade of another, with no drastic differences.

In some ways I prefer this coastal life. I never much cared for the cold of winter or the heat of summer, so the mild climate is a boon for me. That said, I miss the sense of coziness that comes with the cooler fall weather. We don’t really experience that here. I truly don’t miss the bone-cutting chill of Minnesota winters, but a little more seasonal variety might be nice.

Still, I can dream. Life goes on.

It’s fitting then that things don’t seem to change here in the same way they do in Minnesota. In many ways the situation for those on the margins stays the same. Our work with the migrant population stays the same. Their struggles and difficulty stay the same. The government’s response is just as needlessly cruel as ever.

And me, I’m looking for spring.

The same way that autumn is cozy and comfortable, spring is a time of hope and new growth, the melting snow of winter giving way to the bright sunshine of new life.

But no matter how long I stay here, how hard I wish, spring never seems to arrive. In a way, we seem trapped in a never-ending winter of violence and oppression. If anything, the world is getting colder.

But here, in this place, I have found a sense of spring. At the Maria Skobtsova House, spring is always present, in the sharing of laughter and joy, the prayers lifted up together, meals shared around a table of multiple languages and cultures.

And while life here isn’t perfect, and the women we welcome are still stuck in a difficult situation, there is a warm welcome here.

When you enter this place the snow melts and the seeds burst forth in new growth.

I pray that we can spread these seeds of spring to our town and to our world.