What If Autumn Is Teaching You How to Let Go?
Updated: Sep 1
Are you someone who struggles to enjoy autumn? Do rainy days leave you feeling low as you wait for the sunshine to return?
Perhaps you have not yet discovered what autumn can teach us. Today’s reflection explores the gifts hidden within this season—and how we can grow through the rainy seasons of life.
When Harvesting Looks Like Destruction
Picture a field of wheat ready to be harvested. If someone from ancient times were suddenly transported into a modern field, the sight of a combine harvester might be terrifying. The machine would appear enormous, aggressive, and destructive. Its unfamiliar movements and deafening noise could make it seem as though the field were being ruined. Yet the farmer would see something entirely different.
The farmer would recognize that the wheat was not being destroyed—it was being gathered. The harvest marks the completion of one season while providing nourishment for the seasons ahead.
Change and endings can feel much the same. When we are unfamiliar with transition, the end of a season, dream, relationship, or opportunity may appear entirely tragic. People accustomed to pioneering and change may adapt more easily, but even experienced pioneers feel the pain of letting go.
Whether or not you consider yourself a pioneer, autumn invites you to pause, reflect, and recognize what the previous season has produced.
Gathering the Harvest
Autumn is a season of harvesting and storing fruit for future use.
In the same way, the previous season of your life—with all its beauty and difficulty—has produced something within you.
Perhaps you have gained:
wisdom through experience,
endurance through hardship,
patience through waiting,
deeper relationships,
greater self-awareness,
or a clearer understanding of God.
Even a difficult season may contain fruit worth gathering.
What have you learned during the past year? What strength, wisdom, or grace do you want to carry into the season ahead?
Making Space to Grieve
Spiritual autumn is also a time when temporary things begin to fade.We may lose relationships, opportunities, familiar roles, dreams, routines, or versions of life we expected to continue. These losses deserve to be acknowledged. Healing takes time, and accepting that something has ended is often an important part of the process.
As you reflect on the past year or season, ask yourself: What have I lost that I am still struggling to accept?
Acceptance does not mean that the loss was good, fair, or insignificant. It means that we are gradually becoming willing to face what has changed rather than exhausting ourselves by trying to restore what can no longer remain the same.
The Gift of Fallen Leaves
A gardener once taught me that fallen leaves and small branches can be left in carefully chosen areas of gardens and parks.
As they decompose, they return nutrients to the soil. They can also provide shelter for insects and other small creatures. What appears dead or useless becomes part of the process that sustains new life.
Decomposition is not a failure of nature. It is part of nature’s rhythm.
Our losses can sometimes become like fallen leaves. We would not have chosen them, and their value may not be immediately visible. Yet as we process them with God, even painful experiences can eventually contribute wisdom, compassion, maturity, and depth to the soil of our lives.
Releasing What You Cannot Control
When several losses happen close together, our natural response may be to grasp for control.
Trying to control everything is often an attempt to protect ourselves from further pain. Yet it can also keep us emotionally tied to circumstances that have already changed.
What have you been trying to control rather than grieve?
What are you attempting to preserve, repair, or recover even though the season may have ended?
Unprocessed grief does not disappear simply because we ignore it. It may remain beneath the surface and return unexpectedly through fear, sadness, anger, or painful memories.
This does not mean you have failed. It may simply mean that part of your heart still needs time, compassion, and a safe place to mourn.
Choosing to Embrace Autumn
Instead of continually battling what has changed, you can allow yourself to enter an an autumn season.
You can:
mourn your losses for as long as necessary,
process the changes honestly,
consider your situation from a different perspective,
receive support from others,
and gradually accept what lies beyond your control.
Embracing autumn is not the same as giving up. It is trusting that letting go can make room for something new—even when you cannot yet see what that new thing will be.
A Heart-Shaped Leaf
I have gained significant experience in learning to embrace the autumn seasons of life.
Two years ago, my colleague Magda from Poland led a creative workshop for a worship team. During the workshop, we reflected on Scripture, prayed, and worked with clay.
As I shaped a heart into the form of a leaf, I began processing a deep inner pain.
The workshop did not resolve everything immediately. For the following month, I continued grieving. Eventually, I reached a point where I felt ready to release the sadness connected to that situation.
I created a personal “burial ceremony” for the heart-shaped leaf by releasing it into a river. This symbolic act helped me acknowledge that something had ended. It allowed me to let go of the sadness and negative emotions I had been carrying, while also making room for forgiveness, repentance, and healing.
Afterward, I experienced a renewed sense of freedom from the pain.
The ceremony itself was not magical. It simply gave visible expression to an inner process that had been unfolding through prayer.
Your Invitation
As you spend time in prayer and Scripture today, you may wish to begin your own journey of accepting a loss.
Perhaps God will meet you through journaling, painting, working with clay, walking in nature, or sitting quietly in His presence.
You do not need to rush. Give yourself permission to grieve. Allow your thoughts, will, and emotions the time they need to understand what has changed. In time, your heart may become ready to release what has ended and receive what is beginning.
Autumn reminds us that letting go is not always the end of life. Sometimes it is how the soil is prepared for new growth.
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