Happy First Day of Fall! Ah, my favorite season. If you’re like me, I adore just about everything in this season. The fashion slays with coats, boots, sweaters, and oxblood and forest green palettes; the cool crisp air; the crunch of brightly colored leaves newly shed from the trees; and comfort food galore with soups, roasts, and pies pulls at my heartstrings year after year. It’s a season of celebration for me, featuring my birthday, my oldest daughter’s birthday, and one of my favorite holidays — Thanksgiving. It’s a kind of new year, where “the leaves show us how beautiful it is to let things go” (a beautiful quote from an unknown source).
Yet, precisely at a time when nature seems to be shedding and entering rest, us moms tend to gear up for busy-ness. In recent years, many of us have taken up researching “bucket lists” of fall activities put together to help us enjoy everything this season traditionally offers. We adopt these lists with the aim of creating wonderful memories, not knowing that we are taking on a pressure to do these things lest we fail at being a good mom.
As believers, I want to call us out of this hamster wheel of chasing perfect motherhood. I invite you into a more intentional, slower-paced, richer experience, where we check our hearts against the Word and reject the world’s definition of good motherhood. Christ-following mothers know that a childhood void of Jesus is just that — a void. We can take back this season and use it as a way to point our children to Jesus.
My take on the fall bucket list is for Christian mamas who are looking for ideas to point out the hand of God all around us, for ways to be the hands and feet of Jesus, and for tools to disciple our children. And, though this season has sometimes been equated to one of darkness and even gluttony, I reject that notion. Every season belongs to Jesus. Check out how we can make that the focus below:
I’m curious — how do you invite your children to encounter Jesus in each season?
