Today shares a sacred and secular feast day: Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day. Cinderella found love and new life in the end, but not before having to sit in the ashes for awhile. Ronald Rolheiser suggests, “The moral of the story (Cinderella) is clear: before you get to be beautiful, before you get to marry the prince or princess, before you get to go to the great feast, you must first spend some lonely time in the ashes, humbled, smudged, tending to duty, unglamorous, waiting. Lent is that season, a time to sit in the ashes.”
That’s what I plan to do this season. Beginning now.
The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. ~Isaiah 58:11
Bread for the Journey 