You gotta love the Fall! Fall is kind of a “guy” season. Football starts up. Hockey starts up. Baseball playoffs and the World Series. Basketball is coming up quick. What’s not to like about that!?
But there is more to like about the Fall than sports. The return of Fall means a return to order and routine. All the “life as not-usual” is over. Vacations are done. Kids head back to school. Life at work is more focused. The rhythms of life get re-organized. The tune of life marches to a steadier, more orderly beat.
When God created this world, in the opening words of Genesis we read that the before He did, the world was formless and void (Gen. 1:2). The Hebrew words are “tohu” and “bohu”. (I wonder if that is where tofu comes from ‘cause it looks formless and is void of taste!) But while you can have fun rhyming those words, they basically mean this place was a whole lot of random, chaotic, emptiness. Like your kid’s bedroom. No order. No structure. You could never make sense of it.
Kinda like how summer feels to me a times. Not enough order. Not enough structure. No clear routines. No simple rhythms. Life sort of gets out of synch and kids get out of sort as schedules and disciplines break down. Early in the summer, we are all “dying for a break” we say. But by the time Fall rolls around, we are so ready for the order and structure that routine brings.
So could it be that the need for order in life is a quiet witness to our hearts of God’s design for what life in this world was meant to be? He brought order out of chaos and called it life. So maybe that is why we long for Fall. God wired us for it. We were made to live in order. Even your kid’s. Even when their room looks all tohu and bohu.
…just thinkling
