"Dust" | Reflection by Barb Hedberg

“You are dust and to dust you shall return.” A phrase taken to heart every Ash Wednesday throughout my life. My first musings on the phrase led me to think that it was meant to humble us, we are just dust, temporary, living only on borrowed time. It occurs to me now as I think about dust, it does not seem that temporary at all. The dust in my house seems to rejuvenate itself magically to become a permanent fixture on my shelves.

The things I do when I get dusty are life affirming—digging in the dirt to plant and coax along new life. Walking on the beach and watching the water, cleaning the dust on my feet away only to quickly come back again. Dust is easy to brush away, but it is resilient and quickly returns. Perhaps that is really the message of Ash Wednesday. Yes, it signals the start of a dark reflective period in our year, but we know the ending.  After 40 days we celebrate the rebirth at Easter. We begin as dust and return to dust but God assures us, we are resilient and gives us the promise of eternal life.

Words in the Wilderness - Walk through the season of Lent with Trinity, one word at a time. Every day (except on Sundays) we will post a photo and a brief refection written by someone in our Trinity community. https://www.trinitynewhaven.org/words-in-the-wilderness