Introspection: Sifting through the Ashes

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Sifting through the Ashes

Job got to his feet, ripped his robe, shaved his head, then fell to the ground and worshiped:

Naked I came from my mother's womb,
naked I'll return to the womb of the earth.
God gives, God takes.
God's name be ever blessed.

Job 1:20-21 (The Message)

What ever happened to the young man's heart?
Swallowed by pain, as he slowly fell apart

From "45" by Shinedown

In mid-February of this year, during the Ash Wednesday service at my church, Brian Gilmer, one of my pastors, described how the ashes imposed on people's foreheads are traditionally obtained.  The palm branches that are waved during the previous year's Palm Sunday service are saved.  Having dried out over the course of the year, they are burned and ground up, and the ashes are collected.  Pastor Brian noted that there is usually some debris that must be sifted from the ashes before they can be used, and he went on to suggest that Lent is a season of sifting through our lives.¹

Most strangely, this year the fourteenth day of February happened to be both Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day, the latter of which is probably my least favorite holiday.  That day, before I attended the Ash Wednesday service at my church, Facebook reminded me of something I posted on Valentine's Day twelve years earlier.  I wrote, "Happy Valentine's Day!  Enjoy the day, whether you're married, single, or seeing someone."  Pushing forty and still single, I decided to vent some of my bitterness after the service.  I shared that Facebook post, adding, "To my 27-year-old self: Shut your word hole."

A few people reacted to my post in different ways, and on that day it was nice to feel seen.  In the days that followed, I was struck by the hostility with which I reacted to my younger self.  It occurred to me that, when I was twenty-seven years old, life was looking up for me, and I had yet to experience the pain I have since endured.  In the last twelve years, I experienced a lot of loss, and I was put into a number of seemingly impossible situations I did not handle gracefully.  A lot of people emerge from their trials as better people.  I cannot say the same about myself.  In fact, I like myself a lot less than I did when I was twenty-seven years old.

It was as if a fire slowly started spreading through my life, slowly consuming everything bit by bit.  I thought the fire had stopped burning five years ago, when my life started to look up again, but then the pandemic came along and accelerated the fire.  Sometimes I feel like there's not much of my life left.  The image of sifting through the ashes seemed appropriate this Lenten season.

So what did I find in the ashes?

Amid the ashes that were once my life, I found bitterness, blame, shame, anxiety, loneliness, and a damaged self-image, all of which are the kind of things one would confront during Lent.  I also found the same sad story I habitually tell myself about my life, which is a story of pain and loss.  It's an awful story, and even I, as melancholic as I tend to be, am growing tired of hearing it.  Over time, I emerged from the funk in which I started the Lenten season, and I started to see that I really don't need to spend any more time sifting through the ashes of my life.  I need to stop telling myself the same tired story I've been telling, to sweep away the ashes of what was, and to start building something new in its place.

I've been putting off writing this introspection for a while now.  The reason is that, if I'm tired of hearing the story I keep telling myself, then I couldn't imagine that you, dear reader, would want to hear it either.  There's a time to sift through the ashes and a time to sweep them up and move on, and it's time that I finally did the latter.


Notes:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvUtywCdGKU

The photograph featured in this introspection was taken by Alex Grichenko, and it has been released to the public domain.  The photographer is in no way affiliated with this blog.