I love the image of how spring’s green leaves bit by bit fade at summer’s end, unmasking the rich yellows, oranges, browns, and even reds. After months of sporting a green coating, the leaves finally display their true colors. The green chlorophyll pigment (remember that from high school biology?) was just their outer jacket peeled off by autumn’s chill.
In many ways, isn’t this like us? Adverse conditions, stretches of darkness, and less sunshine in our path and our true colors come to the surface. Or as 
Eugene Peterson describes in The Message, “You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors” (James 1:3).
What pressures are altering your colors these days? How is life right now peeling back the real you underneath? The encouraging part of the morphing trees is that they will rest now over winter and jump start with new leaves again in the spring. Nature naturally knows how to bend and begin again.
A
nd us? Part of our bending is weathering the seasons knowing that our fresh starts eagerly await us every morning before the sun even wakes up. Here’s to letting our true colors be resplendent and worth shining year-round.
