I like mornings. I like getting up early before everyone else, even if it is just by 20 minutes or so.

Lately, our mornings have been unusually pleasant so I turn on the coffee pot and go out back to see if Rob and I will be able to enjoy our first cup on the patio. The other morning it was so nice I weeded in the flower bed for a bit. There was something very peaceful in feeling the fresh sun rays on my head with my hands in the dirt.

Some mornings when I turn on the coffee pot, if I have been industrious in the kitchen, I have two loaves of sourdough bread that had their second rise overnight and I can pop them in the oven. There is not a much better smell than baking bread in the mornings. Actually, there isn’t a much better smell no matter the time of day!

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Even if I didn’t have a calendar, I can feel the summer coming to a close. Perpetual rest becomes sloth and there is an internal clock that lets us know when enough is enough and we begin to feel a restlessness. We have gotten pretty good at shushing this inside clock but it’s there.

It never fails that as much as I love summer with it’s slower pace I begin to feel a need to settle into a different routine. It’s almost like when you have been enjoying a really good meal and everything is delicious but you know it’s time to stop eating before it’s just too much and nothing really tastes good anymore. Instead of the memory of how good everything was if you don’t push away form the table you just feel overstuffed and too full.

We’re made this way, I think. To need seasons and change. It’s kind of funny because for most of us change doesn’t come easily, even when we want it, even when it’s good change. In The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis makes the case that because we live in time we must experience change in order to experience life. But God, in His great wisdom, does not wish for us to make make change itself an end so He has also given us a love for permanence. We’re able to enjoy the sameness of life, simply put, because it gives way to something else. It’s a newness anchored in sameness.

“He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.”