For Your Reading: Genesis 2:4-7

"Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."

These words, combined with the blackness of ashes inscribing a rough image of the cross on our foreheads, form the core of our Ash Wednesday liturgy.

It is a ritual act filled with remarkable existential irony. While reminding us of our mortality and drawing our attention to the end of life, we are, at one and the same time, brought directly back to our origin---to the genesis of all human life.

In Genesis 2 we read the ancient story of creation in which God takes earth, clay, dust (in Hebrew 'adamah'), shapes it into a lifeless form, and then breathes the divine essence---God's spirit---into it with the result that the inanimate 'adamah' (earth, clay, dust) becomes 'adam' (literally 'a human being').

The meaning of the image is inescapable. To be human is to be literally 'inspired' by nothing less than the spirit of God moving within us in every moment. Whether we accept it or reject it, claim it or deny it, our life is God's life, divine love animating our every thought and movement, bringing us into being in every moment, all of us, all of our lives, inseparably linked and held lovingly together in divine life here and now.   

This is who we are---all of us.  

A wise person once observed that if we want to discover our destiny we must first understand our source. This is the invitation that marks the beginning of our Lenten observance---not to think so much about the end of our earthly life but to live with a renewed and deeply mindful awareness of our collective and shared origin, every one of us continually discovering and giving unique shape, substance, texture and visibility in our hearts, minds, and bodies to this reality, to this transcendent and divine vision of all human life.      

This too is the heart of mission. For the missional life of God's people is first and foremost an act of remembrance, the challenging and radically transformational practice of bringing into our consciousness and integrating into our collective being, by the grace of God, our true identity.    

It is a fact. God is already present, already working quite gracefully and miraculously within and among us---all of us. It is who we are. Can you imagine?  

Our work, our mission as people of God, is fundamentally defined neither by task nor objective but by our willingness  to immerse our selves in life, real life--to intentionally, prayerfully, and continually order and reorder our lives with God's life so that love might breathe freely through us into a world that longs to know itself.

---Amen.

For Your Prayer: Make time to be still and silent and pray with Psalm 139:1-13

For Your Reflection: What one thing could you do this Lent to order or reorder your life that would give room for love to breathe more freely through you?