Lent Thought, Tuesday 11th March I don’t know about you but walking away from a town centre church on a weekday evening with an ash cross smudged across the centre of your forehead can make you feel a bit self-conscious - like you want to explain to the passers-by giving you strange looks that there’s a totally reasonable explanation for your appearance or more likely, just to put your head down & move quickly on. As I walked through town after the Ashing service this week I realised that being ‘self-conscious’ is probably an entirely appropriate response to having just been ashed. Soot crosses on our foreheads at the beginning of Lent seem a fitting reminder of our mortality, of the truth that ‘dust we are and to dust we shall return’ (Gen 3:19). And this is a reality we should be conscious of. We are mortal beings made “of dust” (Gen 2:7), fragments held together and brought to life by the breath of God. These mortal, dusty bodies of ours are familiar with decay and we feel the tell-tale signs of our mortality every day and in all areas of our lives. I don’t mean just the aches, pains and wrinkles that develop as we age or the blood we spill when we are injured but the more subtle yet equally telling hallmarks of death that we all live with. Our tendency to selfishness, our capacity to wound, our willingness to sin, elements of death lived out on a daily basis. And how we long to be free of these things. Oh how we long to be free. All our Lent observations in their own way express a longing to shake off the ‘sin that so easily entangles us’ (Hebrews 12:1) and find freedom & life in Christ. So let’s encourage each other in these things, let’s share and talk and together live out this longing, holding ourselves, each other and our broken World to the Living One who can breathe life back into us and set us free.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 07:17:50 +0000