You’ve Got Mail
Every September, I think of a line from You’ve Got Mail. Meg Ryan’s character says that she would send someone “a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils.” There is something about that image that makes me smile every time.
Maybe it is because September has always felt like a season of possibility. Even when we are long past the age of buying school supplies, there is still something about the first hints of fall that feels like a beginning. The air shifts. The light changes. Mornings become a little cooler. Somewhere deep in us, perhaps we still remember the feeling of a new notebook and a freshly sharpened pencil, a blank page waiting for something we cannot yet imagine.
September is a threshold month. Summer is not entirely gone, but autumn has begun to make itself known. Gardens are still producing tomatoes while leaves begin to yellow at their edges. Some things are flourishing while others are preparing to let go. Beginning and ending are happening at the same time.
I wonder if life is always a little more like that than we realize. We tend to draw clear lines around things. This is the beginning. This is the ending. This is life. This is death. We make sense of the world by naming what we see. But what if what we see is only part of the story?
Scripture continually invites us to trust that God is at work in places where very little appears to be happening. Seeds disappear beneath the soil before they grow. Yeast works invisibly in the dough. A tiny mustard seed contains something far larger than itself. Again and again, Jesus points toward a kingdom that is already among us and yet somehow still becoming.
Perhaps that is one of the invitations of faith: not to pretend that we know what everything means, but to remain open to the possibility that there is always more happening than we can see. An ending may also contain a beginning. A season of waiting may not be empty. Something that appears lost may be changing form. Even death, which looks to us like the clearest ending of all, is proclaimed by our faith to be a doorway into a life we cannot yet fully perceive.
Paul tells us that we “see in a mirror, dimly.” There is humility in those words, but there is also tremendous hope. We do not see the whole picture yet.
So perhaps September can remind us to pay attention to the thresholds and to look at our own lives with a little more curiosity. There may be things beginning in us that we cannot name yet. There may be new life forming underneath what looks like loss. There may be grace quietly at work beneath the surface.
A freshly sharpened pencil cannot tell us what will eventually be written on the page, but perhaps that is part of its beauty. The story is still unfolding, and life, God’s life, our life, the life of this beautiful and mysterious world, is always bigger than we perceive.