For many in the northern hemisphere, September is embedded in our psyche as a potent moment in the calendar year, even if we have long since departed from the cycle of academic terms.

Shiny new school shoes, new teachers and perhaps a new school and new opportunities: for some, it’s a moment pregnant with newness and potential, despite the lessening of evening light. For others, it can feel like an apprehensive time or seem like the years are slipping by too quickly. How is the youngest grandchild starting secondary school already? How have I come to be applying for school places for my baby?

Set against this intense awareness of change, comes the comforting familiarity of seasonal cycles. The blackberries are bright on the trees and the leaves are beginning to change colour: Autumn is coming again.

As with our own lived experience, the bible presents time both as encapsulated by the particularity of historical moments and epochs, but also as transcending those moments so as to be mapped onto broader cycles, and indeed viewed from the perspective of eternity.

Christ came to us incarnate in a particular time and place and the historicity and particularity of that moment matters. What you are encountering today, in this time and place matters too, even when it feels fleeting. And when we can hold our lived experience in the tension of honouring its particularity, but also viewing it within the wider context of God’s eternal plan, there we find perspective and peace.