“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The invitation of Ash Wednesday is to lean in to our dust-ness. To remember our createdness, and the ways we are sustained in life every single breath…and that there is no guarantee of the next one (so that breath we both just took? another gift of grace). This day sets the tone for Lent, with its awareness of what it is to be human, to be one who lives and dies. And we walk with Jesus on his own human journey through the wilderness places—and ultimately to a place of death…and resurrection. What comes up in you when you hear you are dust? It is meant to be a reckoning with the edges of our lives that we tend to ignore; and so often what comes up is fear, or shame, or even anger at the ways we don’t get to determine our own lives (and deaths). But it can also engender deep gratitude for the grace of this new day, this new breath, a creation always sustained by its Creator. So, just notice this morning: what arises in you as you hear, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”? Spend some time there with God at some point today, in a prayer of noticing (and remember Jan Richardson’s encouragement: “Do you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?” along the way, too!).

Posted by Jamie Bonilla at 2023-02-22 14:48:02 UTC