Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Lent is my favorite season of the Christian calendar. I know that sounds weird. Most people love Christmas and Easter. Easter is the relief from Lent, but my soul resonates with Lent. It's the season of dust. The season calls us to remember how small and finite we are. How broken and dirty our lives can be.
Remember you are dust.
I am painfully aware of how dusty I am. In ways I am unsure most other graduate programs excel at, seminary students know how acutely dust like they are. It's a program unlike all others. Some courses demand your heart. Other courses demand your mind. Almost all will demand both from you. It's a group of students who are giving all of their heart and soul to be the hands and feet of the God they love, while the God they love is being parsed out in a hundred different ways. It's wonderful and terrible at the same time. At some point you have to stop and wonder if knowing so much in your head is pulling from some reserve in your soul and if it is possible to hold on to that fervent love and have what you thought you knew about God broken down and reshaped without losing that drive.
That's the casualty of trying to study something so infinite with your whole being. You end up feeling very finite. Very unqualified. Very much like dust.
You are dust.
Which is not to say that Truett doesn't try it's hardest to walk alongside its students in ways that are as much academic as they are pastoral. And maybe it was more acute for me because of the way I'm programmed to learn and respond- the way I process things. I felt like dust, the smallest and most insignificant speck of dust, incapable of fathoming what existence and reality was.
Dust.
The thing I appreciate about being Baptist is that we impose the ashes on each other. We remind each other that we are dust, but we do it because we are brothers and sisters to one another and walking alongside each other, dust and all. I like the ashes because they are a validation of my existence, which sounds pessimistic, but really is not meant that way. Because we are dust, but we are dust with life breathed into us. We are dust that God declared was good.
I have a Lenten book that I have read for the past four years. Last year, when I opened it, a note from a Truett professor fell out (I had apparently used it as a bookmark one year). Despite the ways that seminary will break you down, it will also build you back up. My last semester I took a capstone class with Dr. Stroope and Dr. Arterbury. Our first assignment was to tell our call story. I hated telling mine because I never feel that it is "good" enough, although it is uniquely mine and by that alone it should be "good" enough for me.
Remember you are dust.
After each student told their story, the professors sent us notes. Dr. Stroope would handwrite his, which is why I still have it. I'm not sure that he could recall my call story if he had to, given the number of students he has worked with over the years, but that isn't the point really. For one semester, one class, one note- I wasn't dust. It's a note affirming my call story. A note affirming that I am who God called me to be. A note that has helped me to remember that although I may be dust, there is still something that God sees as redeemable in me. A note that I keep tucked inside the book to return to every year. A tangible piece of paper that makes me recall all of the good things I've had done to me or for me or said to me over the span of my 28 years. It isn't even that it is from Dr. Stroope, just that it is as a thing in my life.
Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
But remember that you are also more than dust. Despite outward appearances, dust is not dust. The ashes on our foreheads remind us that given nothing else, we are finite. We are insignificant. We are dust that will return to dust.
But those ashes are called to remind us that at the end of Lent, when all seems so profoundly dark and dusty, that something glorious happens, something that washes away the dust and the ash. And that maybe being small and finite isn't so insignificant because the most powerful things in the universe have been accomplished through dust.
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