Ash Wednesday Devotion

Ash Wednesday

February 18, 2015

Lenten Devotion; "Ashes to Stardust"


“Pray in the Spirit at all times with all kinds of prayer, asking for everything you need. To do this you must always be ready and never give up. Always pray for all God’s people.” -Ephesians 6:18

By Kevan Franklin

Sword fights break out in the Palm Sunday Children’s choir! Children tickle each others ears with the prickly end of the branch.  The Palm branches seem to have been given for this purpose. They will remember always these years of childhood and how their presence and faith were cherished by such a large, mixed gathering of people.

Spiritual but not religious folks leave them in the hymnal rack. Some do this reluctantly, wishing they had the courage to carry their Palm branch back home, but know that they cannot for the jokes and peer pressure of others.  For others, their eyes have not been changed yet.  The scales remain and they have not been transformed to see the Holy in every grain of sand.

Youth who want to appear disinterested and cool, quietly slip the palm branch into their bulletin, and in their privacy, later carefully unfold this reminder of the sacred and lay it in a dresser drawer.  Over the years, it will be a consistent reminder that there is more to life than classes and parties and striving to fake it.

A young woman mourning the passing of her father will drape her mirror with the Palms as a silent gateway to the place that lives in her heart, like the fans of Jesus who held up Palm branches creating a portal into a new realm, in a mock ceremony of welcoming a homeless, powerless king into the Capital city.

A little boy stuffs his palm cross into his coat pocket, unaware that years later it will serve as a grave marker on, his companion sent to watch over him through the wilderness of his growing years; his beloved pet cat.  The cross is his reminder of the Holy in the ordinary.

An aged woman will take the Palm home and carefully fold it into a cross as she learned to do years before from a devoted Sunday School teacher.  A reminder of hope and innocence lost and today regained.

I have personally witnessed all of these Palm Sunday acts of faith.

On Ash Wednesday ” left over” Palms, strewn around the church,  left forgotten for another year, are rounded up and burned. The potential to witness the Holy is present even in ashes. With the ashes of our dreams and broken connections to God and others,  we form these remnants into symbols for the ceremony and reminder today that God is with us.   No matter what wilderness we find ourselves in, the Palms and the ashes remind us of the joyful celebrations to come when we welcome Jesus as Savior.  This is where Jesus Lives!  The light shines through the dust and ashes of our lives. 

We begin our journey with an unusual anointing. Today Christians enter churches around the world in quiet reflection and exit with a symbol on their foreheads—ashes mixed with oil applied in the shape of a cross. Reminders of the death of Jesus, and our deaths.  What a difference we could make in the world if we lived with this reminder every day.

Prayer  “Accomplish your work through us, O God.   We ask that through our devotion to these Lenten observances that we may live the rest of our lives in faithfulness and be witnesses of our risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.”


Ash Wednesday (February 18, 2015) invites us into the season of Lent – a time within the church year to acknowledge that we are mortal, limited. Lent awakens us to hope in God whose "steadfast love endures forever".  As disciples of Jesus Christ we are called to struggle against everything that leads us away from the love of God and neighbor. The Lenten disciplines of repentance, fasting, prayer, study and works of love help us return to the steadfast love of God. During Lent we confess our mortality, our limits and our vulnerability so that we might be transformed and become the new life God calls us to be.