A year ago, I walked right out of my comfort zone and into an Ash Wednesday service at a historic Episcopal church near my house. I had recently sent off a book proposal that was, at least in part, about the value of developing what I had come to call a theology of death. I was knee-deep in thoughts about how the Savior who came to die intends to use death and loss to shape us over the course of our lives.
A church service meditating on these themes—from dust we came and to dust we shall return—no longer felt odd to my low-church sensibilities. It felt necessary. I had spent too many years trying to outrun many of the thoughts I had now come to face. I was ready to sit with them, grapple with them, write about them. And I’m not the only Protestant who’s found value in this tradition.
It helps that Ash Wednesday often comes between my early-February birthday and what would be my mom’s late-February one. This has become the period of time in which I feel the loss most deeply. I grow a year older now, and she does not.
At the end of this wintry slowness, I also become more aware that spring will be here soon. The children will grow like the weeds and the time that is coming will move more quickly than the time that has passed. They will grow older, and so will I.
This all, I consider, is part of the way loss has changed me. It has placed me squarely under the faucet of passages like Psalm 90, which gives us words for the ways we see time slipping through our fingers all around us.
You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers. (v. 3-6)
If this reads at first like a downer, stay with me. I used to feel that way, too. But now I see how the first verse and the last two are meant to point us to the middle one (in bold).
The God who made the first man from dust oversees each of our days until we are laid in the dust again. Yes, they feel too brief, too fleeting, never enough. But acknowledging these realities doesn’t leave us in despair. Running from them does. When we face them instead—when we lament the brevity of lives, the impact of sin, the fading of our own frames and of those we love—we are reminded to lift our eyes to the God who sits outside of time. But He didn’t stay there. Christ entered into our confines of time to face the enemy we could not defeat on our own. He faced sin and death for us and He faces it with us now.
These lives, however brief and beautiful, are valuable because He watches over them. Do not despise the passage of time, the ashes remind us, the wrinkles, the fading. Even these are gentle reminders that this world cannot hold all our hopes. Do not despise the darkness, they whisper, that causes us to long for the dawn.
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Memento mori is a Latin expression for the inevitability of our mortality. It literally means “remember death.” This is something previous generations didn’t have to go out of their way to do. Death and birth happened in the living room. But many of us can live a good portion of our lives without becoming as familiar with these rhythms as much of the Bible assumes we are.
The Christian story, after all, is one of life in the face of death. We of all people should be able to look it in the eye. Ash Wednesday, whether we receive ashes or not, can be an opportunity to rehearse that we will not live forever; therefore, live. We can pray with Moses as we consider our brief lives, “So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).
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It's been a year since that first Ash Wednesday service, when the liturgy was interspersed with anecdotes of Ukranian women digging through the ashes of their lives under Russian invasion. Now, we grieve these circumstances alongside others—the incredible loss of life in Turkey and Syria, the thousands left digging for any semblance of hope through the ash and rubble of earthquakes. Whatever it looks like for you, these are ashes and losses worth lingering over for a little while. We can pause with the still-wintry earth to groan with creation itself. We can say with growing vigor, Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus. We can grieve with hope.
A year after that proposal, I am now close to finishing the book that it birthed. Working on my second-to-last chapter yesterday, I found myself trying to name the change that this work has wrought in me already, the change I hope it renders in the reader, too.
Some of that change has happened under the slow but shaping hands of time. Like waves on rocks, the weeks have worn away the harshest edges of my early-days grief. But the deeper change has felt like wound care, painful yet healing in the hands of a good physician. I am learning to trust the painstaking work of the One who knows death and all its after-quakes more intimately than I do. Time and again, I find each chapter leading me to meditate more on the person of Christ. I find, sometimes only in looking back, that hardship, loss and pain have led me again and again to the end of myself and into the arms of the One who holds all things together.
Dane Ortlund writes that the bitterest parts of this life, if humbly received, can become “God’s gentle way of drawing us out of the misery of self and more deeply into spiritual maturity.”
“Pain,” he writes in the book Deeper, “will foster growth like nothing else can—if we will let it.”
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One of the odd things about this little strip of time I’m in is how easily I can drift between deep and somber thoughts—like this newsletter topic—and the lightness of delight, which I wrote about in my last newsletter. I am learning to hold the joy and the sorrow in tension, yes. But I’m also learning that they aren’t necessarily in tension.
Some of the sorrows that have most emptied me, most hollowed me out, are also the very things that have given me a greater capacity for joy. Missing my mom, for example, leaves me relishing the chance to be a mom right now.
I keep thinking of how easily my kids bounce back from the dramatic tears of a scraped knee or a sibling squabble, how easily children return to joy. They don’t feel the need to hold tightly to anything else. And I think, make me like the little children, Jesus, who bring to you their greatest heartaches as easily as fresh-picked fistfuls of dandelions. I don’t need to hold all these emotions at once. I don’t need to hold them all together. But I can keep going to the One who can and does.
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Am reading/listening:
I just finished Raising Emotionally Strong Boys by David Thomas of the Raising Boys & Girls podcast. It has been a helpful Hoopla listen for me in this season of studying and trying to best equip my kindergarten son for life in this brave new world. I am so grateful for the way he weaves counseling and biblical wisdom together and includes uber-practical tips for all of us who have boys and men we love (but don’t always intuitively understand!). We also recently watched the movie McFarland USA on Disney+ on his recommendation and highly recommend it as an inspiring family flick.
Deeper by Dane Ortlund, especially the middle few chapters, is rocking me as deeply as Gentle & Lowly did. This one is on how we grow in Christ. It is yet another chance to marinate in the truth of who Christ is toward us and how the Holy Spirit empowers growth and change. The chapter on how God uses pain has been so helpful as I write my own in a similar vein.
Our church recently started a mini-sermon series preaching through Romans 8, so I’ve been returning to a wonderful album from Immanuel Worship called Romans 8 Live. I stumbled upon it in 2020 while doing Trillia Newbell’s Romans 8 study and I tell everyone about it. The album is a meditation in spoken word, song and short devotionals on the passage and a beautiful way to get this pinnacle passage of Scripture into our bloodstreams.