Listopad… Falling Leaves

So I just realized what the literal meaning of the word Listopad, the Croatian word for the month of October, means: Falling leaves. Isn’t that kind of poetic? I really love it. Though I think it probably suits the more northern or inland areas of Croatia than Split. I remember our first autumn here, having grown up in northern California with it’s very vivid four seasons, here it kind of seemed like fall never really came. It does get a bit cooler as September closes and by October instead of the blazing heat it is a pleasant warm, sometimes chilly when it is breezy, then winter is usually some blustering winds and rain, the worst it can ever bring is the bura, the north wind that is so icy it just cuts right through you. But then spring comes around again and I feel that I lose that sense of change, or at least it is muted.

But some aspects of fall are the same; we live on the outskirts of town and I do think that there are at least a few people who still burn wood to heat their homes. Sometimes when I go outside there is that faint woody smokey smell that is so reminiscent of when I was growing up. There is just something to be said about a wood burning stove, it is comforting how it warms you up all the way through.

And then of course all of the students that are bustling to and fro from school is another aspect of fall that stays pretty true no matter where you are. It’s not really strange to us anymore though that throughout the day there are always children outside. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the morning or the afternoon, there are always children running around. The reason is because the schools here work in shifts, for one week you have morning class, then the next you have evening class. This is because many of the schools are understaffed so they have to divide the students into two classes; one for the morning, one for the afternoon. Thomas can’t understand why I tell him one day that Mario, his older friend is at school and it’s morning and then another day I tell him that same thing and it’s at another time of the day, I think that he thinks I’m making up stories!

Another things that always strikes me about autumn is that there is a season for everything; and there is a time that those things that were once green and vibrant with life reach a point where they dry up and become wilted, and then eventually die. I can be rather introspective sometimes and I wonder how older people feel while watching young people, I feel pretty sure that they feel like it was only yesterday they were just the same and wonder how in the world life got away from them.  How it’s come to pass that the leaves are falling in their lives? I think we so often take for granted this day that the Lord has made, that we don’t redeem the time because the days are evil. And then sometimes, for some people they don’t even get to reach the autumn days of their lives, the very breath that they breathe in so effortlessly is snatched away from them in a moment and suddenly there is no time left at all. Last Friday as we drove past an intersection that is almost always busy with traffic and pedestrians we saw that it was completely blocked off, then we saw a shoe, then a grocery bag, then the car and then the covered body. I’m sure that the woman didn’t imagine that morning was going to be her last, but it was and more likely than not she died without knowing her Creator. It was so very sobering to me to see death in such a stark lucid way, it made my heart ache with the knowledge that there are so very many who could breathe their last at any given second and be lost for eternity. It makes me want to make the most of every chance I have to share with someone the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to shake myself from any kind of apathy and remember that Love compels us to reach out and pluck the lost from the flames that are waiting to engulf them.

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