When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.
– Psalm 94:19

I tend to spend Septembers and Octobers complaining about the poor excuse for fall we have here. Fall, real East-Coast fall, is cozy knits, sweaters and boots, long wool coats, glorious bursts of maple reds and oak yellows, apple bakes and teas in big mugs. It’s a crisp smell in the air, that first whiff of relief from the oppressive humidity and insects of the summer.

As if some subconsciously homesick part of me remembers, every September I go looking about for fall, but it’s hard to detect within the sunny time capsule of meteorologic perfection that is Bay Area weather. Maybe there’s a brown leaf or two on the ground. The rest is artificially concocted by putting up fall décor and inserting pumpkin flavoring into whatever we can.

And so I was surprised when, driving around in November, a time of year which typically descends into the barren, wintry chill of the holiday months, I couldn’t help but notice the resplendent colors of fall. There were brilliant orange, red and yellow leaves everywhere, in profusion! Trees at the kids’ school, trees along the neighborhood, golden leaves fluttering off bare brown branches before my very eyes. Just when I had given it all up with the confidence of experienced cynicism, just when I least expected it, here was a November fall.

It got me to thinking about how many things are like that: small, surprising, unbidden experiences of joy, set against a backdrop of loss, struggle, or apathy. Our nine-year-old son’s giggle is like that: short and silly, it always bubbles up at a time when no one else is laughing, as if it can’t be helped. He’ll be learning a piano piece, hit a wrong note, and giggle, because the mistake was funny. Something about the dissonance was delightful, in a way that can’t really even be replicated. It’s like a little burp of happiness, that surprises him as much as it does me.

I’m grateful for these consolations. They are like little solaces, little comforts, reminders that even though bad times come, unexpectedly good ones do too. These consolations nourish and sustain us. They take us out of ourselves long enough to see that our struggles are not all there is. Sometimes the struggles even soften us to see the beauty more, to be that much more touched by a song or story, an act of compassion, a moment of beauty. That’s what I’m thinking of this November: what it means to sit down at the Thanksgiving tables of our lives. To stop, notice, appreciate and consume the consolations that God sets before us.