Ash Wednesday Reflection

Are any of you tired? Not just sleepy or fatigued, but deep-down-to-the-soul tired? How about lonely, or hurting? Or like you just can’t catch a break? Or do you ever feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders? Have you known failure or inadequacy? How about the feeling of trying your hardest, with the best of motives, and then having others mistrust your intentions?


I’ve been there, and I’m sure most of you have too. Such is life on Earth. Sure, it’s punctuated by moments of joy and great blessings, but on the whole it can be pretty trying. Just think of all the people who can’t take it and seek escape in substances, addictions, counterfeit love, and feel-good ideologies. It’s tough down here, and the reality of that comes clearer with each year.

That’s why I like Lent. Perhaps it seems depressing to focus on the sorrowful and the painful. Perhaps taking on sacrifices seem just too much to ask on top of the daily weights we bear. To me, though, there is, at the heart of the season, a lesson of hope, and of joy. The joy is that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15). And we are reminded that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16) What suffering have we known to compare to the cross? What loneliness is like the loneliness of separation from the Father, suffered by one who has been in full unity with Him since before time? What weight on our shoulders compares to the weight of all of human sin? What rejection have we faced to compare to coming to the world to die for man, and being rejected by the very ones for whom we suffer?

The stark contrast does not make light of our own struggles, but makes good of them. Just as the sufferings of Christ were not wasted, nor shall our own be so long as we offer them to Him, uniting them with His. It is a burden He joyfully carries, even amid the pain, and He carries it not in vain, but to a Glory our own senses cannot yet perceive.

Ash Wednesday is today. Let us enter into Lent with expectant hearts, bringing our pain, or suffering, and our sacrifices to lay at the feet of Our Lord as an offering to the only One who can make good of them, and the One who is dying to do so.

God bless,
David