Tuesday Read: The Eve of Ash Wednesday

Tomorrow, Ash Wednesday begins Lent with the stark reminder: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). Priests will mark foreheads with ashes made from burning last year's Palm Sunday branches - the same palms people waved while shouting "Hosanna!" now reduced to ashes marking our mortality. It's one of the church calendar's most somber moments, forcing honesty about death, sin, and our desperate need for salvation.

This feels wrong to modern sensibilities. We don't like being reminded of mortality. We avoid funeral homes, hide death in hospitals, use euphemisms like "passed away" instead of "died." We spend billions on anti-aging products, cosmetic surgery, and anything promising to delay the inevitable. Acknowledging we're dust feels morbid, depressing, unnecessarily dark.

But Ash Wednesday's genius is precisely its unflinching honesty. You are going to die. Your body will return to dust. Every achievement will be forgotten eventually. Every possession will be someone else's or garbage. Everything you've built will crumble. You cannot escape this reality through denial, distraction, or determination. Death is coming, and you're powerless to stop it.

This sounds depressing until you realize it's liberating. If you're going to die anyway, what are you pretending for? If all your accomplishments ultimately turn to dust, why are you measuring your worth by them? If death is inevitable, what fear holds power over you? Ash Wednesday strips away our pretensions, our pride, our carefully constructed images. You are dust. That's the brutal truth. Now what?

The "now what" is the gospel. You are dust - but God loves dust enough to become it. "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14). God took on dusty human form, lived a dusty human life, died a dusty human death. He didn't stay aloof from mortality - he entered it fully, experiencing everything dust experiences, including death.

And then he rose. The dust that died came back to life, transformed and glorified. This is the promise Ash Wednesday points toward: you are dust, but you won't stay dust. Death isn't the end for those in Christ. "Just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man" (1 Corinthians 15:49). You're dust now, but resurrection is coming.

This is why Lent begins with ashes and ends with Easter. You have to walk through honest acknowledgment of death before you can genuinely celebrate resurrection. You have to face your mortality before resurrection becomes more than metaphor. You have to admit you're dust before the promise of new creation becomes precious.

Tomorrow begins forty days of preparation for Easter. Forty days to face honestly what you usually avoid - your sin, your mortality, your desperate need for a Savior you can't save yourself. Forty days to strip away pretensions and acknowledge what's true: you are dust, unable to save yourself, destined for death, completely dependent on grace.

But don't stop there. You are dust - but God breathed life into dust once and he'll do it again. You're marked for death - but Christ died your death so you could live his life. You're mortal - but mortality isn't the final word for those in Christ. Ash Wednesday marks you with death, but Easter promises resurrection. The ashes on your forehead tomorrow testify to both realities: you are dust, and dust is not your destiny.