Story 1. This morning, I dropped my parents dog off for them at the kennel. They have a small dog who thinks the front seat is an appropriate place for dogs to sit. As we pulled into the parking lot, however, she shot across my lap and stood up on her hind legs, barking—yelping—through the window. In the front yard at the kennel they have these stone figurines that are nearly life-size. The figurines are a Collie, a Labrador Retriever, and a Pitbull, and this is what she was barking at. “They’re not real,” I told her. But she just kept right on barking. “They…are…not…real.” But of course, there was no way for her to know this. From 30 feet away and behind glass there is no way for a dog, or for any of us for that matter, to know what is and is not real, what is and is not the same as us.
Story 2. Last night, I was in my dining room. My wife was down the hall in my son’s bedroom. “What do you have going tomorrow?” she yelled to me. We had been trying to figure out who was going to pick our daughter up at her sewing lesson and who would drop our son off at his basketball practice. “I have the Ash Wednesday service at 7 p.m.”
“Oh, right. That’s tomorrow, isn’t it?” (Don’t judge her. In a world that produces as many daily ash heaps as ours, it’s hard to remember which day is actually Ash Wednesday. Plus, you haven’t heard how the story ends yet.)
“What’s Ash Wednesday?” my son asked (he’s 10, don’t judge him, either).
“It’s the day we remember that we were made from dust,” my wife replied very matter-of-factly. There was a long pause. “I wasn’t made from dust,” my son said somewhat indignantly. “I was made from you.”
There was another pause, this one even longer. I couldn’t see my wife from where I was sitting, but I couldn’t wait to hear her reply. “Well, it just means that sooner or later everything goes back to being dust. That in the end, we’re all the same.”
“Whatever,” my son said. “I still say I came from you.”
Story 3. Over and over again the Good Book says God is like a Sower. In the beginning—we’ve heard it told—when God decided it was time to create you and me, God reached down into the dusty earth, and picking up a clump, God breathed life into that which up until then had been good only for growing cactuses and kicking up dirt. Likewise, it goes on to say, once upon a time there was a Sower who went out and threw down seed everywhere—on the rocks, on the path, among the thorns, and just some in good soil. Now we can judge this Sower all day long for putting down seed in places where no seed is ever going to grow. Everyone knows you can’t grow anything from a rock or along a path. So why does the Sower try to? What a waste of perfectly good seed.
It could be that this Sower is just a bad judge of soil. Or, or, it could be that this Sower is a better judge of soil than we are. It could be that this Sower has seen the dandelion that grows up between the crack in the pavement, and the rose that buds amongst the thorns. It could be that this Sower has stood close enough to see what is real. They’ve stepped around to the other side of the glass, reached down into the dust and breathed into it. They know what is real: we come from dust, we are the same. The 10-year old was right! We come from one another. And by the great mercy of the Sower, we shall be redeemed.
PleaseGrace 