The First Fall Walk: Faithfulness in Every Season

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven." ~Ecclesiastes 3:1

My wife and I are finally able to go on walks with our daughter now that the heat has subsided. As we were enjoying the cool Fall air together the other night, I told her how funny it was that the weather

seemed to wait to cool off until the calendar officially changed seasons.On the walk, I observed how I resist the change from Summer to Fall, despite Fall being my favorite time of year, because it signals the year is drawing to a close. I’m never quite finished with Summer when Fall comes. There's always the baseball game I never went to or the drive-in movie I didn’t make time for. The season changes on its own schedule, not mine.

Faithfulness in Every Season: Why God's Promise to Noah Still Holds

It's a reminder that God's faithfulness in every season isn't a coincidence of weather — it's a covenant He's kept since Noah.

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes knew that tension well. "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1). He goes on to list them in pairs — a time to plant and a time to pluck up, a time to weep and a time to laugh — not as a complaint, but as an observation about how God built the world to work. Seasons aren't interruptions to life. They are the shape of it.

God made a promise about this rhythm a long time before Solomon wrote any of it down. After the flood, He told Noah, "While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22). That's not a scientific observation. It's a Covenant. Every changing season since has been God keeping His word, whether we notice or not.

I think that's what unsettles me about the first Fall walk. It's proof that time is moving whether I've made peace with it or not — in the yard, and in the house, where my nearly three-month-old daughter is already starting to roll over. I'd rather hold a season in place a little longer. God never designed it to work that way, for the weather or for her.

So here's the question worth sitting with: what season are you still trying to keep from ending, even though God already moved on to the next one?

On my walk, instead of mourning what was over, I looked at my new family, and I thanked God for my family and for His faithfulness in keeping a promise about cold and heat every single year without fail.

Daily Practice: Notice one sign today that a season in your life is changing — the weather, a stage of parenting, a job, a relationship. Instead of resisting it, name it out loud to God and thank Him for His faithfulness in the turning, not just in the staying the same.

Always improve the present moment.

~Corbin Riley