This week many churches across our community celebrated Ash Wednesday and the imposition of the ashes. Clergy from many different denominations put ashes on people’s foreheads and said something along the lines of, “remember from dust you were created, and to dust you shall return.” What a powerful statement that was!
As we all start the journey of this Lenten season, when we prepare for Good Friday and what it has in store, may we all be mindful of what those ashes mean. Have you ever really felt the presence of God pressed up against you? I’m reminded of the Bob Dylan song, Make You Feel My Love that was most recently reprised by the Grammy award-winning singer Adele. It so wonderfully states, “I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue, I'd go crawling down the avenue. Know there's nothing that I wouldn't do to make you feel my love.”
You see God is a lot like that song, God took a walk down a street on the way to the cross so that we might be free. One of my favorite memories growing up at Broad Street United Methodist Church was seeing the cross that was an ugly symbol of death on Easter morning being adorned with flowers. Life out of death, out of ugliness came beauty.
Recently I went to a concert that Appalachian was putting on with my friend and her family; Tim O’Brien is a famous folk music singer and has this wonderful song about a pretty fair maiden in the garden. The song talks about how this lady who is missing her fiancé as he is fighting in the war, a stranger approaches her and asks her to marry him. She replies that her fiancé has been gone seven long years and she misses him so she won’t marry him. The stranger replies that maybe he’s been slain, or hurt or even married to someone else. The pretty fair maiden replies that she is still very much in love and would be willing to wait forever for him. The stranger in an unusual sense of beauty reveals his ring that he was wearing, the same her fiancé had. She realized that he was in fact the fiancé she had waited for.
People of faith God is amidst our ashes. When life seems it’s darkest God is at work making Easters out of our darkness. So this Lent look for that Easter of unending joy. Look, and you may see God. God may not always be as obvious as we would like God to be, but God is that fiancé who comes home. God is trying to let us feel God’s love. We must be willing to put those ashes on our forehead, remember that we are dust, and let the love in. Thanks be to God, that we are dust, but never forget that God created the dust that formed us!
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