"Ash Under Snow" - 02/18/2026

With the winter storm warning today, you may be hearing the wind push against the house and watching fresh snow cover everything outside. It feels like the world has been softened into quiet white, even as the air is still moving and restless. In that kind of weather, Ash Wednesday can feel especially close, the small trace of ash held against all that brightness, and the steady comfort that God remembers us with tenderness, right here in the cold and the drifted snow.


Scripture
“for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.”
- Psalm 103:14 (NIV)


Reflection
A day arrives each year when the church dares to speak in the plain language of the earth. Ash Wednesday comes without spectacle, carrying a quiet request for honesty and a longing for something real beneath the noise.

Ash is not only an ending. It is also what remains when fire has finished telling the truth. In the prairie’s memory, fields burned clean can become fields made ready. What looks like ruin can become a thin, gray layer that changes the soil’s chemistry, making room for new growth. The sign of ash is often received as loss, yet creation keeps offering a second meaning, an opening.

Psalm 103 does not shame the human body for being small. It names it with tenderness. The Holy One remembers dust, עָפָר (ʿāfār, dust), not as a verdict but as knowledge held like a warm palm around something fragile. Dust is not garbage. Dust is ground, the shared material of every living thing, the common thread that links breath, bone, and the wide field outside town. In North Dakota winter, snow can feel like a great blank page, and the wind can polish days into silence. Against that brightness, ash looks stark, almost scandalously honest. Yet honesty is sometimes the first mercy.

The ash traced on skin is a kind of boundary line, not between holy and unholy, but between pretense and reality. It interrupts the habit of self-sufficiency. It speaks of limits without despair, of mortality without bitterness. It makes room for μετάνοια (metanoia, change of mind), not as self-improvement but as a gentle turning, like a face slowly turning toward light. Even repentance can be imagined as a return to what is most true: that life is received, not secured.

There is a quiet freedom in being dust remembered by God. The world trains hearts to perform, to curate, to remain invulnerable. Ash refuses the performance. It does not argue. It does not decorate. It simply tells the truth and, in doing so, becomes strangely restful. The inner life, 마음 (maeum, heart), is allowed to unclench. The soul can stop pretending to be endless and start being present.

Ash Wednesday holds a paradox: the mark that names impermanence also becomes a sign of belonging. Dust belongs to the earth. The earth belongs to God. What is marked with ash is not rejected. It is claimed. Beneath the gray is the hidden kindness of the One who forms, knows, and remembers. Beneath the confession is a promise: nothing honest is wasted, and nothing small is forgotten.


Prayer
God of compassion, who remembers dust with love, gather what is scattered within and among us. Let what is false fall away without fear. Let what is living be made tender and true. Hold our limits in mercy, and breathe your peace into all that needs healing. Amen.