The days are still long and hot, but the sales flyers in the papers, hawking school supplies, pronounce prophetic truth: autumn is coming. Though we long to cling to summer, it slips through our fingers like water.

It's a good time of year to engage in the spiritual discipline of releasing. To ask ourselves what we are clinging to, that perhaps is getting in the way of our clinging to God. So often, as St. Augustine said, God wants to give us good things, but our hands our too full to receive them.

For me, this fall is one of releasing a leadership position I've held for more than a decade. God has some other things for me to do.

Many churches, including mine, operate on a calendar that shadows the school year. Classes and groups gear up in the fall, often take a break for the summer months. For the past decade or so, August was a time for me to prepare for the adult education class I would lead at my church from September to May.

Over the years I have led a spiritual formation class, most ...