Fall is slowly approaching, and I can hardly believe another year is already drawing to a close.

There is something about this season that makes change impossible to ignore. The air grows cooler. The days become shorter. The trees begin releasing leaves they spent months growing.

Everything familiar begins to change.

Perhaps that is why this season feels so fitting for where I am right now.

So much has happened lately—some of it painful, some of it confusing, and much of it beyond my control. I find myself hoping these final months of the year will bring a little more light into my life and into the lives of those around me.

My uncle was deported back to Laos, leaving my aunt alone and uncertain about what the next chapter of her life will look like.

I want to help her.

I want to guide her away from choices that may bring her more pain. Lately, she has been returning to some of her reckless ways and surrounding herself with friends who may not be the best influence on her.

I want to remind her that she deserves better.

But she is a grown woman, and I cannot choose her path for her.

That has been difficult for me to accept. When I see someone I love struggling, my first instinct is to step in and fix whatever is hurting them. But there are some lessons we cannot learn on another person’s behalf, and some decisions we cannot make for them.

All I can do is remind her that she is loved, support her when she allows me to, and pray that she will find happiness within herself again without losing who she is along the way.

I also found out that my little flower moved this past weekend.

He used to live across the street from my aunt. Whenever I visited her and saw his car outside, I would breathe a small sigh of relief knowing he was home and safe.

It was such a small and ordinary part of my life that I never considered how much I would notice its absence.

Sometimes, when I was in the area and the weather was bad, I would leave a note on his windshield reminding him to drive safely. Although, knowing the Minnesota wind, I still have no idea whether he ever found them or if they disappeared sometime during the night. 😂

I haven’t had the chance to catch up with him yet, so I don’t know where he moved. After a recent awkward incident, I also wasn’t sure whether it was the right time to reach out and ask if he needed help.

So I will allow the distance to be what it is for now.

I trust that we will eventually move beyond the awkwardness and find our way back to an easier friendship. Until then, I will simply hope he is safe and settling peacefully into wherever life has carried him.

With both my aunt and my little flower leaving that neighborhood, a place I had grown so accustomed to visiting suddenly feels different. That familiar little corner of my life has changed, and I know I probably will not find myself there nearly as often.

It is strange how a place can remain exactly where it has always been and still no longer feel the same.

Over the weekend, I also attended a friend’s wedding and reconnected with one of my old YSA friends. She is the daughter of one of the grandmas from church who is now battling stage-five kidney disease.

I love that grandma so much.

Seeing her daughter brought me back to the first year I met her at church and how quickly I came to enjoy her sense of humor. So much time has passed since then, yet part of me still remembers her exactly as she was when our paths first crossed.

Now I find myself facing the possibility of losing another grandma.

I am working on arranging a time for some of the Relief Society sisters and me to visit her. Last Christmas, she was one of the members we visited when the missionaries went caroling. She was already growing weaker, but she was still well enough to sit with us and enjoy our company.

It breaks my heart to think about how much can change in less than a year.

Over time, the people I have met through church have become more than familiar faces I see on Sundays. Somewhere along the way, they became my family.

Perhaps that is why the possibility of losing them hurts so deeply.

I hope I will have more time with her. I have even considered taking the girls to visit her for one of our upcoming Young Women activities. Sometimes the most meaningful thing we can offer someone is our presence—a little time, conversation, and reassurance that they have not been forgotten.

My Young Women president is also enduring another painful loss. Her father-in-law passed away this past weekend and her family has not even held the funeral for her own father yet.

One grief has arrived before the first has had time to settle.

There is already so much weighing upon her heart, and I pray that the storm surrounding her family will calm soon.

Part of me longs for life to return to those peaceful, ordinary weeks when we can simply feel the Spirit and save the restless battles for another day.

But life does not always give us time to prepare for what is coming.

Sometimes change arrives gradually, like autumn settling over the trees.

Other times, it enters without warning and leaves us trying to understand how everything became so different so quickly.

I was reminded of that again during another conversation at the wedding. A friend told me something about my ex that shocked me so deeply that my mind went completely blank.

As I drove home, I could not stop thinking about what she had said. I kept wondering how differently my life might have unfolded if I had known then what his niece now says he did to her.

I am still struggling to process it.

His niece also says that she told me about it at the time, that I disregarded what she said, and that I continued dating her uncle anyway.

But I have no memory of that conversation.

Something so serious is not something I believe I would have knowingly dismissed or easily forgotten. If I had understood that she was telling me something of that magnitude, I know I would have confronted him.

I don’t understand why she remembers telling me when I cannot remember being told. Part of me wonders whether she now sees me as someone who knew what happened and simply chose not to care.

That possibility hurts because it is not who I am.

At the same time, I do not want my confusion over what I was or was not told to diminish the seriousness of what she says she experienced. Her pain deserves to be taken seriously, even as I struggle to reconcile her memory with my own.

I am left with questions I may never be able to answer.

What did I know?

What did I fail to understand?

How differently would I have acted if the truth had been clear to me then?

Perhaps one of the most painful parts of looking backward is realizing that the past cannot always give us the clarity we seek. We replay conversations, question our memories, and search for signs that only seem visible now because we are viewing them through a different lens.

But no matter how many times I revisit what happened, I cannot return to the past as the person I am today.

I can only decide what I will do with what I know now.

Recently, it feels as though so many parts of my familiar world have begun shifting at once.

My aunt is facing a future she never expected.

My little flower has moved beyond the familiar place where I once knew how to find him.

Someone I love is growing weaker.

Another family is carrying more grief than seems fair.

And a past I thought I had already left behind has returned with questions I do not know how to answer.

My instinct is to reach for everything at once—to rescue, protect, understand, and restore each situation to what it was before.

But perhaps that is not what this season is asking of me.

Fall does not try to preserve everything exactly as it was.

The trees release their leaves.

The flowers return to the earth.

The daylight slowly fades.

Nothing remains unchanged, yet the season is not without purpose.

Perhaps change does not always mean that something has been lost forever. Sometimes it simply means life is moving into a form we do not yet recognize.

With the year drawing to a close, I pray these final months will bring gentler days to all of us.

I pray that my aunt will find the courage to build a life that brings her peace.

I pray that my little flower will be safe wherever life has planted him.

I pray that those who are sick will feel surrounded by love and that those who are grieving will find moments of rest within their storms.

I pray for truth to bring clarity where the past has left confusion.

And for myself, I pray for the wisdom to recognize what I can change, the humility to accept what I cannot, and the faith to trust God with everything I do not yet understand.

Perhaps that is what this season is here to teach me.

Not how to keep everything from changing, but how to remain grounded when it does.

Not how to return life to what it once was, but how to trust that light can still be found in whatever comes next.

Love,
Ang 🌸