Ash Wednesday 2026

A meditation, and a bit of an apology

First, y’all: I have too many loose threads hanging heading into Lent this year, I know all too well. Even for my “low expectations” Substack. There’s an uncompleted series on the Newark Holy Stones I left at an interesting turning point some months back, and while I did finish my series out of Memphis from the Disciples of Christ General Assembly, there’s a fall series on “Archival Discoveries” and our history as a religious body which I left in mid-stream, as well. Plus a parallel narrative is far too well developed in my head to leave unwritten, let alone my nearly completed preservation history narrative of the Newark Earthworks, both unpublished on this platform. So that’s two visible uncompleted tales, and a two invisible to you but haunting my thoughts.

My mother’s health continues to deteriorate, physically and mentally, and let’s just say spending quality time in a hospital is a great way to get sick yourself (especially when norovirus is running through a community). My sister and brothers are closer at hand, while I try to run over when I can to be of support and even occasional assistance, but Bloomington, Indiana, while a very, very happy community right now (hat tip, Fernando), it’s still a long drive each way.

Anyhow, I am still filling in for a small church that’s trying to make some hard decisions, and teaching Disciples history & polity online three times a year, along with a few other community roles including Cub Scouts (yay!) & housing concerns (boo!). I do plan to write more on the three subjects at hand; my next post may well be a precis of where I’m at with each project, and soliciting from you fine readers a rough poll of where I should focus my scattered efforts and in what order. But on the subject of focus, and gathering scattered efforts, that brings me to today, Ash Wednesday, and the following meditation I posted to Facebook, and wanted to share through this platform as a good way to look at the next few days and weeks as Lent begins . . . or so I believe.

Here you go:

Ash Wednesday 2026

In the annual Protestant wrangle over Lent and whether it’s a time to fast or not, I have counsel on what to give up.

Give up on “getting Lent right.” Seriously. It’s worse than New Year’s resolutions, and too often giving up something for Lent is a warmed-over gone-bad New Year’s resolution reheated for February. Just throw the dish out, please.

What I suggest (unless you have made a decision already about your Lenten discipline, feel at peace with it and the challenge it will be for you in the coming weeks, and are already satisfactorily into it) is this: ask God what you should be doing.

But! Don’t, for St. Peter’s sake, answer it right away. Especially if you are answering the question “God, what do you want of me at this point in time?” Because reasonably YOU shouldn’t be the one answering, right? Give God a moment. Sit with the question. Breathe with the question. Let the question rest in your thoughts until it becomes a question, and not a demand or even a request. A question. “What is it I, as I am, where I am at, should be doing?”

“Doing” is a question itself. I like Micah’s answer, which Dick Hamm helped carve into the spirituality of a generation of us in the Disciples of Christ: to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. (6:8 if you’re looking for the context.) For you to do justice, love kindness, and humbly walk with Divine presence near at hand, what would that look like?

Personally, I think sitting with that question could take up to two weeks of Lent right there. Not answering it yourself, but being in and with and through the question in the presence of a Person beyond your immediate reality.

At some point, an answer will arise. Oh, it will. Anyone thinking people don’t do this because it feels pointless will find a different pressure up against their spiritual discipline if they try. The growing anxiety more often is “what will God ask of me?” And it’s a fair question. If the answer is something that just seems too much, too far, too way out, what then?

Good question, but remember: you’ve already screwed up Lent. No worries. You asked, you sat, you opened up yourself, and you heard or felt or even (some people are visual learners) saw an answer, and your immediate response was “nope.” You saw what the Olympic skiers do standing in the opening gate at the top of those crazy mountains, or on the platform looking down at the ski jump, a postage stamp below. And you’re freezing.

AP photo (see link at bottom) of the Cortina ski jump, Feb. 2026

The thing is you don’t have to jump. This is where grace should enter, or rather re-enter the picture. You are beloved of God, right now. With or without Lenten disciplines, okay? But your love of God and the goodness and truth and beauty you want to work with God to bring into the world means you’d like to be a more active participant.

Okay then, look out across your question and the answer you are perceiving, and then without guilt or stress, go back to the bunny hill. Have a few runs on the green diamonds. Play in the snow at the bottom. Go into the lodge and have a hot chocolate. Just don’t forget that answer you perceived, and the possibility it represents. Keep asking “God, what would you have me do?” Sometimes God resets things for us after taking us up on that ski jump, and maybe it was always to help make the smaller thing look easier and simpler in proportion. And sometimes it is part of the preparation to get us back up to the high jump, the bigger thing. I don’t always know about these things; God’s staff work is often a mystery to me.

If God would just release an administrative memo every Ash Wednesday, saying on the latest granite tablets “This Lent, for maximum blessing, you all should give up chocolate (except, of course, on Sundays), Amen” -- it would be so much easier. We’d know what to do, we’d know when we’d failed God by sneaking a hidden away Dove square from Christmas, and that’s that.

God does not work that way, I know for certain sure.

What I believe could work for almost anyone, though, whether you “believe” in giving up something for Lent or not: give up on getting it right, and give yourself over to asking God “what would you have me do?” And spend Lent working with the fact that I’m pretty sure you will get an answer. That’s when the fun starts, he said, standing nervously atop his own ski jump, looking down at the landing zone.

(Oh, and Woodside Presbyterian Church on Woods Avenue in Newark, OH is having a brief Ash Wednesday service at 4:00 pm, with corporate confession of sin, absolution proclaimed, and ashes imposed for those who wish to wear them for a bit. I don’t promise to get each cross exactly perfect. A blessed Lent to you all!)

https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/milan-cortina-olympics-photos-ski-jumping-photos-dbe4f2aae01f10108b82e31021ef0034