For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. But you refused. Isaiah 30:15

Things are not always what they seem. Just consider ash and time. The end of a thing. The true unmoved mover. Remnants. Immutability.

Ashes are what remain after the conflagration. The cold, dead after-hours of what was once energy and light. A charcoal rendering of what once was. Lent begins with ashes. A smear of last year’s celebration mixed with oil and hope? regret? longing? Whatever the emotion, ash is the color of Lent. The sky agrees with this today. The light cannot sustain anything but a dull partial effort. Lent is for what remains. The carbon carcass of a distant Hosannah.

And time. A most relentless taskmaster. They tell me that it bends and dances like a child on a trampoline, but all I get is less and less. Could I ask you to bend, to slow, to tarry, Dear Time? Could we wait for a moment in this brief before-tide before the world quickens into spring? Shall you and I step off highway and sink into the gravity of grace?

These things are not what they seem?

Stuff and nonsense.

We live in the world. Three meals a day, finding shoes for each foot, checking off tasks, wiping a nose, bandaging a paper cut. These are the things of my days. This is no gothic romance with soaring moments and metaphorical remains. This is life.

It is life. And there is no way around it. It will hurt deeply for no reason. It will bore you stiff. It will infuriate and numb you.

But this glorious disappointing life is ours. None of us know anything else. Shall we fast, this lent, from the indignity of insisting that it will all turn out alright when we know it most certainly won’t. We are all plummeting through time in one direction. But we are here. This is not how we thought it would turn out. It is all a little more work than promised. It is all a little more relentless than I could have imagined. My reading-nooks are dusty and my dustpan is full. But it is life.

Amidst all this is a tiny lesson. A tiny, enormous lesson: life is not at the end of the journey. Life is the dustpan and the reading nook. Life is the making of peanut butter and jelly and the wiping of noses and the struggle of teaching a child to knit. Life does not start with the Hosannahs.

Life and death and time and ashes are all caught up in this riotous spinning we call being.

Writing prompts for this Lenten Journey:

Before I go back to…
It should be simple…
“Reality is not as it appears…”
It is such a waste of time to…
What I found instead…
Everything I know about time:
But you promised…