Ruth tipped the curtain and looked out on the barren world.

Webbed branches traced wounded patterns of winter’s encroaching hold. Several clouds glimmered in the distance, their edges ragged with the wind’s cold breath.

A hush had fallen over their home. Night was coming and even the last geese had passed across the cool sky and descended towards the south.

Twisting her fingers within the airy fabric, she leaned against the window frame.

The coldness? The barren land? The quiet oncoming march of winter?

It was all there.

But to Ruth, her eyes lingered on one grand display before her eyes.

Melted swirls of fire-lit colors and throbbing golden threads blending across the sky created an image of beauty beyond compare.

“Enjoying the sunset?” It was her sister, a kind smile in the tone.

Ruth nodded, keeping her eyes upon the vista.

An arm wrapped around her shoulder and her sister whispered.

“You know we couldn’t see the sunset like we do now, if the leaves were there.”

The leaves.

Ruth’s gaze refocused on the twisting branches, bare of the brilliant foliage that had once been theirs. Open arms reaching upwards, their gray sides wept with the dying of life.

But the vista of sunset …Ruth looked back to the throbbing colors turning the horizon into a flame of fire.

She couldn’t have seen it like this had not death happened. Had not a season changed, and life been gently extinguished from their branches. Tears watered within her soul and she gazed at the empty arms of wood tracing their delicate sides through the sunset colors.

Ruth whispered, the thoughts almost too meaningful to say aloud. “I think …seasons in our lives that may seem barren or hard–are something that God can use to help others see His glory.”

Ruth twisted her grip even more tightly into the fabric, her whisper barely audible. “Mother would’ve loved this sunset.”

A squeeze of her shoulder was the only answer.

“For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;” 2 Corinthians 4:17