Ash Wednesday, Again

Lent has arrived, again. Today it was accompanied by fat, fluffy, snow flurries. It was beautiful, to my eyes anyway. I heard other opinions that perceved today's weather with descripters not so kind. I suppose it is that business about the eye of the beholder.

Ash Wednesday is the point in the church year that we enter into the season of Lent. Of course, it is Lent that will deliver us at our Easter {and resurrection} celebration. We go through the difficult and dark journey of Lent in order to arrive at the joy of Easter.

This night, as we enter into the Lented experience, we do so with ashes drawn on our foreheads in the shape of the cross. While the imposition of ashes is a long-held tradition for the church, how odd it is to use burned palm branches, mixed with olive oil, to leave a smudged cross on the face of the gathered faithful...a stark reminder of our own fragility alongside of the promises imbedded in Jesus' death on the cross. The words that will be spoken are equally as severe, 'Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.' 

Those ash-crosses and age-old words are to remind us that God is God and we are not. Grace, mercy, forgiveness, hope, and life are utterly dependant upont God's faithfulness, not our own. Beautiful, yes? Beautiful in the eye of the believer!

Pastor Leah