Last week, on an evening walk with the dogs, I came across an elm tree that inspired me to come to a dead stop.

No easy feat, considering the 160 pounds of eight-legged muscle that was tugging me forward.

The tree’s leaves, starting from its lowest foliage, were the dark, luscious green of summer, and moving up the length of the tree, the leaves turned to a vibrant light green to electric yellow to pumpkin orange to fire truck red to lastly a deep, velvety maroon.

This tree could only be described as luminescent! It looked like it was plugged in!

This singular tree stood proud on the boulevard, giving our neighborhood a headliner-worthy performance for the ages. Friends, I literally stood agape in the street admiring its wonder before eventually our dogs’ impatience won out.

As I passed under the tree’s lowest branches I vowed to come back that night to capture a photo of the tree as I knew it was something spectacular.

Trouble is, life happened, and I didn’t get back to the tree that night. And the next day, I didn’t get a chance to walk the dogs until after sunset, delaying the photo op yet again.

Finally, a full 48 hours later, walking the dogs again, I was full of anticipation because this time I was ready to capture a photo of the tree in all of its splendor. I knew there was a column about God’s infinite imagination there in that tree, and I was bound to capture a photo of its proof.

But the strangest thing happened.

As I approached the block on which my star-powered tree had stood, I found another tree in its place. This tree was a duller shade of red throughout most of its canopy. Gone was the electricity the tree had possessed; gone was the neon rainbow of colors.

In its place, was a still-beautiful tree with a full crown of special reddish leaves the color of wine. But it was a different tree than I had witnessed just 48 hours prior.

I’ve thought a lot about that tree, and its lesson this past week.

Rather than getting a column about God’s infinite imagination out of it, I am poignantly reminded that we live in a stream of time, and at no point do we get to freeze that stream, as much as we would like to.

This new, unexpected lesson reminds me that I have that tree’s gift — a special display of life’s seasonal changes — seared into my memory even if I never get to relive it again. … And, that is what is so special about these short seasons of life we live.

Soak in the luminescent trees in your lives, my friends. That is God’s design. Amen

‘

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of

Churches United, a homeless shelter in Moorhead, and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.