Minister's Page

The coolness and clarity of Fall is fast approaching. The trees are beginning to burst into radiant colors - it is as though GOD has leaned down and kissed each one. In Bedford County, where I live, tourism will pick up, as visitors will come to the Peaks Of Otter and the Blue Ridge Parkway in order to experience the splendor of GOD's creation. But Fall, nonetheless is, after all, a foreboding of something far less than the brilliant beauty of foliage which is to say that Fall informs us that winter is not too far behind. Cold mornings, frost on the windshields, ice, snow, and bone chilling wind are hardly things I anticipate with much joy. However, I do look forward to those times when I can watch it snow from inside our sunroom and that is most exhilarating. Winter for some is almost doom and gloom - unrelenting cold, slippery sidewalks and roads, higher fuel bills, cold winter nights when a storm interruots power, the treat of alarming strains of flu. What I have to insert is that winter is but one step away from spring and the awakening of the earth to a new season of growth and beauty. Each of earth's seasons has its own beauty and that may explain as "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Each season has its own drawbacks and its own particular joys. Life is sort of like the seasons - ups and downs - times of joy and times of distress - times of hope and times of dispair. But the Creator is always there and constant as the rising sun - offering to us the promise to be with us in the winter-times of life and the spring-times of life- the one hope that if we remain faithful and true no matter what- that eternal life is ours for the keeping-to live forever in the spring-time of life.