just this

On a Wednesday, I sit waiting for physical therapy, twisting my stiff neck to look as a woman walks in with an ash-black smudge right in the center of her forehead.

This looks like no accidental blemish I’ve ever seen, and for a moment, feeling a little uncomfortable for her, I wonder how it came to be there and if I should do the neighborly thing and tell her, um, hey, you’ve got this thing, right there. Briefly, I imagine myself making an awkward motion toward my own forehead, my pointer finger wagging right back at me.

Then she turns in my direction on her way to the reception desk, oblivious to me and my observing, and suddenly I see clearly the undeniable shape of a cross, the edges thumb-smeared and bleeding into her skin, and I conjure some officiant quickly drawing an ash-dusted thumb down and then across, post and then crossbeam, an encouraging voice, low, urging, remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

It’s Ash Wednesday.

The ash cross acknowledges grief over sin and the wages of death, and thus, in anticipation of Easter, our honest need for the cross and the resurrection. 

Just last night, in the pitch of night before surrendering to helpless sleep, I had scrawled in my journal a captivating question from an evening prayer meditation.  In what ways today have I projected a false image of relevance, importance, and competence, when in fact I am vulnerable, fallible, and broken?

I had written, I think I do this all the time without even realizing that I’m doing it.

The Spirit of God reminded me swiftly that the poor in Spirit will inherit the kingdom.

Night fell, and I remembered that it’s the one who falls on her knees before God and everybody, pleading for mercy, who will be justified.  I had gone to sleep hearing His invitation to openly confess and be healed, to become a repenter.

Somewhere I’d read that repenter had been the label slung upon Romanian Christians during the 1970’s, that it had been spat out at them as an insult.  And yet.  The public acknowledgement of grief over the persistently dark struggle in my own heart only affirms and magnifies what God has done despite me.  To say that all is grace, well, that’s the whole truth.

All this, on the eve of Ash Wednesday, and now here I sit, watching that woman with the ash-black cross smeared bold, as she stands at the reception desk with her hand on her hip, talking about something she just bought at the grocery, her passion for a certain brand of peanut butter.  Here she is, just going on about her day, that sign on her face like a dirty comment about her imperfection—no, I suddenly realize I’ve got the perspective all wrong–about the accomplishment of Christ.  I sit back against the back of the plastic chair.  Could it be that in honestly confessing my fallibility and brokenness I am actually finally pointing away from myself to the amazing love of Christ?  God loves this kind of turn, I know.  Only He has ever been able to transform an ugly killing thing into the symbol of steadfast love.

In my favorite painting of Christ, a modern depiction entitled From the Ashes, artist Elizabeth Ivy Hawkins captured the resolute determination of Christ to die on the cross for us, as well as the absolute disfigurement and suffering caused by human sin.  To accomplish this, Hawkins used broad smears of black ash mixed in with the paint.  Everyday, I walk into that room and look at Jesus wearing the marks of me.

I run a thumb lightly over the increasingly more wrinkled skin of my own forehead.  Post, then crossbeam.  Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  I can’t even approach His cross except by way of acknowledging my own indebtedness to grace.  It feels daring but utterly right to join the apostle Paul in making that cross my boast, far more right than every attempt I’ve ever made to present myself as right or to be right or to consider my rightness the highest goal, and so, to justify myself.

I heard once about a group of Christ-followers who set up a confessional on a college campus, but when people stopped by, instead of looking to receive the confessions of others, these apprentices to Jesus spoke openly about their own hopeless wrong-heartedness and their need for His forgiveness.  They were loving Jesus with a sacrifice of false pride, which is what I see now in this woman’s ash-drawn cross, a testimony meant to knock aside an earthly crown.

But I’m just an invisible woman against a wall on Ash Wednesday, waiting to take my stiff neck to able hands for healing.  She has no idea how she’s testifying to me.