A LASTING IMPRESSION

A Story Appropriate for the Season of Lent:

I grew up in a small community in the mountains of Virginia.  The little church we attended was as simple and uncomplicated in its style of worship as the building that housed it: clean, uncomplicated, unsophisticated, and un-ceremonial.

I became a minister at age 26, and soon discovered how my home church had not prepared me to be a pastor of a more traditional (think “ordinary”) church.  The expectations of the small congregation I pastored in those early years were often for things with which I had no experience.

Nothing illustrates that better than what happened in my very first Ash Wednesday service.  Whatever my intentions and expectations may have been entering the pastoral ministry, as it happens I came to make a truly lasting impression in my very first year.

I had never in all my life been to an Ash Wednesday service, and since I was a student pastor (still in college at the time, after four years in the U.S. Navy) I had not yet taken any courses in how to do the service.  So, I sought the input of a retired minister who attended our services.

He answered all of my questions, and I prepared the service.  Un-fortunately I did not know all the questions that needed to be asked; which is what lead to my leaving a lasting impression.

I didn’t know to ask where I would get the ashes for the service.  It seemed like a no-brainer: I would have to burn something to create them.  And so I did.  I burned a couple of old bulletins that I found in the office, and then I ground the ashes into a fine grain with a mortar and pestle that my dad had given me.

I took the ashes and mixed them with water.  During the worship service I had the people line up for their ashes, where they would receive the sign of the cross on their foreheads.  This was to remind each of us that we were but dust, and we were sinners.  At the close of the service I had them wipe off their ashes because we have all, in fact, been forgiven through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

Here’s where the lasting impression was made.  I had mixed the paper ashes with water.  That formed the acid known as lye.  The acid reacted with the skin on our foreheads, and after the ashes were wiped off, a red rash remained.  Of course it was in the same shape as I had made the ashes: the shape of a cross.

Talk about witnessing!  Everywhere any of us went for the next few days, people knew we were Christians!  After that lasting impression was made the retired minister explained that we are supposed to burn dried palm fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday service and use those ashes, mixed with olive oil.

Never again have I left that type of lasting impression on Ash Wednesday.  I’ll never forget the comment of one of my young adult members the day after that service, when I was finally able to laugh about it.  He said, “You really made an ash of yourself last night, Preacher.”

So true, so very true.