The Message of Ash Wednesday

When Hope was a baby, she attended her first Ash Wednesday service.

At that point, I’d been distributing ashes for several years at the church where I worked. Every year, we were reminded: Everyone gets ashes; even the babies.

That directive had always been disorienting for me, but that year, as a new mom, it terrified me.

Hope was my rainbow baby and I didn’t want to put ashes on her forehead and say, “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.”

Who wants to think about the mortality of an infant?

I didn’t.

Yet, Doug carried her forward and I swallowed a sob and did my job, gently using the ashes to mark a cross on her forehead.

Like so many difficult things, the moment was sacred.

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This year, Hope is not home for Ash Wednesday. She’s on her “big trip” with school—a trip she (and us) have been looking forward to quite literally since she started attending her school seven years ago, when she was two.

When we put her trip on the calendar months ago, Hope realized she’d be gone for Ash Wednesday. Being the church kid she is, this disappointed her. Even so, I didn’t think much of it until a few weeks ago when she brought it up again, in tears about missing this important day.

For years, we’ve taught her that the beauty of Ash Wednesday is that it’s a day that’s about confronting all that is hard, including our own deaths.

In her young life, Hope has confronted more hard things than we would have liked.

Thankfully, she knows that church is a place where we can talk about hard things because she knows that's the message of Ash Wednesday.

She knows that she can tell God anything and it won’t change God’s love for her.

She knows she can tell us anything and it won’t change God’s love for her.

And so, of course, Ash Wednesday matters to her.

She wants to be marked with the cross and reminded—not just that she’ll return to dust—but that life is hard sometimes and when it is, it’s okay to name that. We don’t have to fake it, pretend it away, or be happy Christians all the time.

God is in the hard.

In fact, in Jesus, God experienced the hardness of life first-hand.

And so, when I dropped Hope off at the airport on Monday morning—something that felt really hard given the state of the world—I left her with a packet of notes to read each day. In the one marked Wednesday there’s a bag of ashes, all ready to go, and a reminder of the words, “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.”

Her plan is to put them on the back of her hand so they’ll be slightly less noticeable, but a reminder all the same that sometimes, life is hard and yet God is still here, at work.

I know I need that message today. 

Maybe you do, too.