"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven." - Ecclesiastes 3:1

The first image is of the very vivid change of color in my photos as I scroll through quickly and restlessly, looking for the one I'd like. I am looking for gray and white, for snow. But I'm beginning in May, and the colors fly from dandelion-yellow to ocean-blue to woodsy-green to the bright-orange-yellow of autumn. And suddenly, the photos are duller in color - it's November, December, and I've arrived at winter. How can this be, that we're here again?

The second image is of notebooks, filled with handwriting and doodles sprawled across the pages. Notes to myself in my journal, morning after morning of watching the view in the window change. Notes in class, pages drenched in information (but my mind is already drenched, and how can it all fit?) And at the end of the semester the pages drip with snowflakes, snowmen, and Christmas trees. (And a gingerbread house - that took time).

The third image is of skeletons of trees, shivering and bare. Through the classroom window the great blanket of leaves is gone and I can see clear down the hill to the road below and the hills behind it. The world has become transparent without the leaves' covering, and I remember again that winter is a time for clarity.

These images tell me it is the cusp of winter. Here on the cusp of winter I am reminded again, as life moves as rapidly as the colors in my photos fly, that there is a time for everything. These images tell me it is a time for change, and there is joy in that fact, because by the grace of God not everything is asked of us at once.

Thank goodness for December, a time for endings and beginnings.