It’s been two weeks since Ash Wednesday. If you received the ashes, they’ve long since disappeared from your forehead.
Maybe you missed it this year; perhaps Ash Wednesday and the observance of Lent is just not something you do.
Whether you did or didn’t, it’s not too late to stop and reflect on where you are now, and where you will be at the end of the 40 days of Lent, and further, where you will be at the end of what we call “life on planet Earth.”
Try getting this image in your mind: it’s that photo of the parent with ashes on her forehead, the lady who was waiting on news of the shootings at the school in Parkland, Florida. She is holding a child who looks like a teenager. They are both waiting, crying, writhing in agony.
She received those ashes earlier that day, several hours before death moved to her doorstep.
If the Ash Wednesday service she attended was a Roman Catholic one, she would have heard the priest say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Even if you are a Protestant, like me, and not Roman Catholic, even if you didn’t have ashes on your forehead, you still can and should face the fact: you are going to die.
I like the story of the guy who was moving to Arizona. It seems his allergies were so bad due to the humidity in the Ohio River Valley where he lived in Kentucky, that his doctor recommended that he move to a more favorable climate. The patient thought Arizona would be better, so he wrote the Health Department at the State Capitol Building in Phoenix and inquired about the statistics on death. Someone in the Health Department send him this terse reply: “The statistics on death here are the same as they are in Kentucky: one out of one dies.”
It’s from Genesis 3:19, that is, the words of the priest. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The forty days of Lent are a good time to meditate on that and hopefully a time to come to terms with them.
I’ve not been able to verify the facts, but I read where the Benedictine monks on the tiny Island of Iona, off the coast of Scotland, are required to build their own casket as one of their first projects upon arriving. They are to take meticulous care in every detail of creating their casket. It is a way of coming to terms with their own death. They are not ready to live the monastic life until they are ready to die.
You don’t have to become a Benedictine monk and build your own casket to come to terms with your death. Nor do you have to receive ashes on your forehead.
But you really should think through that truth about your own death. And no amount of exercise, or variety of supplements, or numbers of cosmetic surgeries can keep death from one day arriving at your home, your home, for you.
The words of Ash Wednesday become the truth of our own death. It’s true for all of us, each and every one. You know it cognitively, but have you really come to terms with it deep within yourself?
The ashes on the mom’s forehead washed away sometime later on that awful day, February 14, 2018. I don’t know her pain, because I don’t know her circumstances. But I know something of death and the final good-byes to loved ones, people precious to our lives.
And what’s more, I have glimpses of life, real life, eternal life, spoken to me through the Scriptures, from the One who conquered death on that first Easter Sunday.
They are from Jesus Christ, who said, “The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live.”
You don’t have to wear ashes to get that.
And live it forever.