Today many of us will participate in Ash Wednesday services, offering ourselves – our brokenness and failure and our highest hopes — to the One who created us all. Today we enter the penitential and reflective season of Lent.

Church Without Walls will offer ashes and prayer as part of our Wednesday Morning Prayer and Coffee Fellowship outside Clara White Mission. At midday we will take to the streets offering “ashes to go” for downtown folks out and about over the lunch hour.

It is a time to remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But, in the words of poet Jan Richardson it is also a time to consider “what the Holy One can do with dust.” It is a time of surrender – and at the heart of our surrender is hope for the future.

God calls us again and again to turn and offer all that we have and all that we are to the possibility of new life. It is also a call to and affirmation of community. Dust gets blown by the wind of the Spirit and soon we cannot say that is mine and this is yours. The best we can do with dust is to acknowledge this is ours and all belongs to God.

I long to see what God dreams, to see what he will do with us, with dust.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
Let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked not
for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

–excerpted from the Jan Richardson’s poem “Blessing the Dust” in Circle of Grace (p 90)