Pastor David Cameron has written this week’s letter. We hope you are blessed by his thoughts this week.

“…the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion— to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”

         Until I became the minister of music at CHBC in Martinsville I was never part of a church that held an Ash Wednesday service. In fact, I had never attended one.

          Ash Wednesday was discussed in my Seminary classes. When I was growing up we read and studied in Sunday School about folks in the Bible wearing sackcloth and ashes to signal sorrow and repentance, but ashes weren’t a part of my faith. At least, not in that way.    

          When I was five years old our house burned.  It was a total loss, and if my dad hadn’t noticed the smoke when he did, it would have been worse.  My covers were catching fire when dad pulled me out of my bed. I remember dad running with me to the neighbor’s house and almost catching up with my mom who had my baby sister in her arms.

          When we were allowed to go back a few days later, it was hard to believe what was left had ever been a home. After all these years I can still remember the sharp, bitter smell of smoke. Anything we touched left an oily, black film all over our hands. Mom just pulled me close and cried. Dad walked around a bit then came and stood with his arms around us.

 Mom quietly asked, “What are we going to do?”

Dad didn’t say anything for a long while, then he turned us both towards him and told us, “We’re going to build something better.”

This was a memory I’d put away for a long time. God brought it back to me the week before my first Ash Wednesday service. I was outside on a cold, windy day trying to keep a BBQ grill full of dried palm branches burning long enough to make ashes for the service, and thinking to myself, “What good is going to come out of all this work for a bunch of ash?” Somehow God nudged that memory for me.

The ashes remind us of what WAS.  Things we shouldn’t have done but we did. Things we should have done but didn’t. Missed opportunities for grace and love, words we wished hadn’t been spoken. All these things burn in the furnace of our past. We take on ashes to remember and then repent.

And Jesus forgives us, then turns us away from the ashes of yesterday to face Himself, offers His love, and invites us to work together and build something better.

Thanks be to God, for beauty out of the Ashes.  

David Cameron