Crunchy leaves, crushing lies

As the leaves on Liberty Mountain begin to take on orange and yellow tints, the air grows colder, and the sun makes shorter appearances, I begin to develop a familiar somberness. For many, these signs are the tidings of beginning seasonal depression. For me, they represent a mix of things. 

Once the first day of fall hits, my family pulls out dusty, clumsily taped boxes filled with glass pumpkins, small pilgrims, drawn turkeys made with once small hands, and various fall-related films. One of these, “Luther,” starring Joseph Fiennes, never fails to convict my introspective, seasonal heart.

When in China during the fall of 2019, I was reaching the three-month mark of living in Shanghai and desperately wanting to see orange and red in the trees. All the trees in the surrounding area turned to a lemon-yellow as they shed their summer coats, and the terrain was as flat as Kansas’ barren plains (sorry, Kansas homies). My family is incredibly romantic when it comes to fall tradition, and China doesn’t have the equivalent of the culture I had grown accustomed to at home. I slipped into somber quietness and became incredibly self-critical; missing friends, mountains and candy corn, I searched for ways to fill the absence that I felt so intimately.

I couldn’t fill it. With increasing frequency, my mind returned to dwell on my own inadequacy, my loneliness, my inability to act in the way that I wanted and the ever-present reminder that I wasn’t home. The leaves turned from yellow to brown and fell, effectively giving me a better view of the utter flatness that stretched in every direction.

When Reformation Day arrived (my family supplanted Halloween in favor of remembering our favorite German theologian), I prepared myself to watch Joseph Fiennes as Martin Luther question his faith, his legitimacy as a monk and his personhood as he argued against the devil. 

At an epitomal point in the film, Luther is preaching to his church body. He speaks of the spiteful whispers of the devil, and his response to them is, “I know that I deserve hell and death — What of it?” What power these words hold! 

In his article titled “Martin Luther, the Devil, and the True Church,” Thomas Renna writes, “What makes the Devil so dangerous for Christians is that he entices them to deviate from true doctrine. He directs his attacks toward the central belief of the Christian religion: justification by faith alone. Satan seeks to subvert this sola fide, the foundation of true doctrine.”

As Christians, we can confidently and bravely face the assertations of the devil as such: acknowledging the truth that we are imperfect. We are incapable of fixing ourselves. We never hit the mark. But none of this holds the weight it used to, for we trust in Christ, and God sees the whiteness of his robes, not the stained tatters that we once wore.

Depression is a pit. Sometimes it feels like it’s easier to remain in that pit than to begin the arduous climb out. It’s easy to forget that no pit is so deep that my Savior can’t find me in it. He knows every struggle, every thought of my heart; and when the devil tells me that I am inadequate, broken, sinful and beyond all hope of saving myself, my Father has given me the ability to say, “What of it?” 

In this gathering gloom that we fondly call “autumn,” I prepare my heart for these next few months and hold tightly to the joy of red leaves, the certainty of salvation and the knowledge that my Father is always there, no matter what pit I find myself in.

Glen is an opinion writer for the Liberty Champion