In Abigail Santamaria’s new biography of Joy Davidman, entitled Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis, she recounts a recurring dream that Joy had throughout childhood. She found herself walking down a street called Daylight. She rounds a corner and follows a grassy path into an unfamiliar world. She stumbles along until the trail opens onto “a strange, immeasurable plane” where in the distance rose the towers of Fairyland, a perfect kingdom, a place where, she wrote, “Hate and heartbreak/ All were forgot there.” But then, before she could cross the threshold, she woke up, in a child-sized bedroom in the less idyllic world of the Bronx.

I love Autumn, but I have had people tell me they hate it. “Everything is dying,” someone told me, “and it makes me sad.” In a last blaze of color, of orange, red, and yellow, the leaves give their last, falling, but in their dying, bring new life to soil, readying the earth for the sleep of Winter and the new life of Spring. Everything is dying so that everything might live.

Isn’t that life? We have a recurring and true waking dream (and perhaps night dream) of Heaven, a place where hate and heartbreak are banished, and yet we stumble along a crooked path until we have a glimpse of that Kingdom, and then, we awake, realizing that it is coming, but not yet. We kick at the leaves on the path, the remnants of Fall, crunching acorns underfoot, on our way to Spring. For Joy, “hope lingered in the morning hours;” so too, hope endures in our every new morning. In Lamentations 3:23 the prophet in the midst of lament has that dream, that the Lord’s “mercies never come to an end,” that they are “new every morning.” In Fall, there is an emptying, a dying, and we kick leaves as we stumble along the path to Spring, to the new, to Fairyland, to Joy.

Honestly, I believe that most people, beneath their shellacked or impassive exterior, behind laughter and irony, are afraid and anxious. They lack hope. They fasten on the present. They kick at darkness but can’t ultimately hold it at bay. Yet God promises steadfast love. He promises Fairyland. He is certain in the midst of uncertainty. We may stumble, may even fall, may even lie down in the sleep of barren winter in our soul. But we will awake, in Fairyland, full of Spring.