Fall is a sober spin on beauty.

When out for a walk, I never tire of fingering brightly colored leaves in my hand. The hues are so intense that they seem more like a Photoshop project gone wild than a display of unedited nature.

But even as I cradle those leaves in my palm, I’m reminded of beauty’s brevity. Were I to scoop up any of those leaves and take them home, by nightfall, they would be curled, and by the following day, their intensity faded.

Whether a sunset, a full moon, or a newborn's face, beauty is fleeting. You can't package it, extend it, or in any other way preserve it. Not for any length of time. And that is the maddening thing about beauty.

Perhaps a culture like ours that seeks to "own" and "collect" merely exacerbates the problem. With the click of a mouse, we can have almost anything we want delivered to our doorstep in 48 hours—or less. So why shouldn't Amazon Prime likewise be able to deliver beauty that lasts?

But beauty doesn’t work that way. It is the unique gift of our creating Creator. He makes a new batch of beauty—every single day. Which is a really good thing because sin is in the business of destroying beauty.

Here’s the plain truth. You can’t own beauty or capture it. You can only:

• Thank God for it.
• Enjoy it for what it is.
• Worship the Giver, not the gift.

In the end, maybe the brevity of beauty is the reminder we need of the splendor of heaven, where we will at last gaze upon our beautiful Savior. In His kingdom, there will be nothing but beauty—a beauty that never fades.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11