It’s been a strange week, calendar-wise. I don’t remember if our various cultural traditions have ever come together in quite this way. Last Friday was Friday the 13th; Saturday was Valentine’s Day; Monday was Presidents’ Day; and for those of Asian descent like me, yesterday was the beginning of Lunar New Year. There was nothing official on the calendar for Sunday, though if you’re a basketball fan, it was the end of All-Star weekend.

And for believers, last but by no means least comes today, Ash Wednesday, marking the first day of the Lenten season.

Ash Wednesday is a longstanding tradition, celebrated not only in Catholicism but across numerous Protestant denominations. At a typical Ash Wednesday service, worshipers receive the sign of the cross on their foreheads, as a symbol of repentance and a sign of their devotion to Christ. The ashes themselves may be made from the palm fronds left to dry from the previous year’s celebration of Palm Sunday.

And as liturgists use the ashes to make the sign of the cross on a worshiper’s forehead, they often intone, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Those words hold more and more significance to me as I get older. As the last surviving member of my family of origin, as someone past retirement age but still working, as someone officiating or attending an increasing number of memorials, I think a lot about endings, about what it means to end well. It’s one thing to ponder what it means to live well and faithfully when you seem to have your whole adult life stretching out before you; it’s another when you know your time is unpredictably short.

We are dust, and to dust we will indeed return.

But we are more than dust. We are soul and spirit. Who we are will live on in the way we touch the lives of others around us now; will that be for good or for ill?

And even our physical bodies will someday be raised to glory.

In his letters, including his letter to the Colossians, the apostle Paul teaches that resurrection isn’t just about the future, but the present. We may still live in perishable bodies, but we have already been made new, given a new nature. And it is our calling to live out of that new nature in our personal lives, in our communities, in the way we relate to others.

So if you’re looking to give up something for Lent, Paul has a suggestion: how about anger and malice toward others? How about lust and greed? What about sinful language, including slandering someone else’s character or lying? Maybe social prejudice against people we look down on?

You can give up chocolate, too, if you like. But the point is to wrestle with our mortality and weakness, to repent of the sin that made the cross necessary, and to anticipate Easter with hearts full of both lament and hope.

What better way to do that than to live in resurrection newness now?