Shepherd's Heart 2/6/26
One Ash Wednesday, I stood at the front of our sanctuary with ashes on my thumb and the ancient words on my lips: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. One by one, they came forward. Faces I love. Foreheads tilted toward me in trust. And somewhere between the third and fourth person in line, my mind wandered.
Did Jeff remember to pick up Caleb from football lifting? What time does it get over? I need to check on that. And the sermon for Sunday still needs….
It was fleeting. But it was weighty. Because in that fraction of a second, I was somewhere else entirely. I was doing what I always do, what our culture has relentlessly trained me to do: managing, planning, staying ahead of the next thing. And I was doing it with ashes between my fingers.
Then someone stepped forward who stopped everything.
She had been on a cancer journey—months of treatment, months of our congregation holding her in prayer, months of hoping and aching and believing together. And now she was standing in front of me, forehead tilted, waiting for the words.
Remember that you are dust.
Suddenly the liturgy wasn’t ritual language anymore. It was almost too real to speak. The ashes on my thumb carried a different gravity. Dust wasn’t an abstraction. It was standing right in front of me, wearing the face of someone I’d been praying for.
And in the collision of those two moments—my distracted mental to-do list and her embodied mortality—something cracked open that I’m still sitting with as we enter this Lenten season again.
Here is what I think that crack revealed: I am more formed by the pace and noise of ordinary life than I am by the sacred rhythms I claim to inhabit. And if that’s true for me, the pastor presiding over the ashes, I have to wonder if it’s true for many of us.
Something is not right when Lent becomes another line item on our already-overstuffed calendars. Something is not right when we approach a season designed to undo us with the same productivity mindset we bring to everything else. We make our Lenten plans—what we’ll give up, what we’ll take on, which devotional we’ll follow—and without realizing it, we’ve turned a season of holy disruption into a spiritual self-improvement project.
We live in a culture that has liturgies of its own. Every notification on our phones is a call to worship. Every algorithm is a formation tool. Every scroll through social media is shaping our desires, our attention, our sense of what matters. James K.A. Smith puts it with uncomfortable precision in You Are What You Love: “We are liturgical animals—Loss of ritual does not mean the disappearance of worship, only the loss of the church’s ability to effectively form us. In short, if you are not being intentionally formed by the counter-liturgies of Christian worship, you are inevitably being formed by other liturgies—many of which you don’t even recognize.”
Read that again slowly. We are always being formed by something. The question isn’t whether formation is happening. It’s whether we’re aware of what’s doing the forming.
My wandering mind at the Ash Wednesday service wasn’t a moral failure. It was a diagnostic. It revealed what had been quietly, persistently shaping me—the relentless liturgy of productivity, of managing, of never quite being present to the moment I’m actually in. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
This is why Lent matters, not as a spiritual discipline challenge or a forty-day willpower test, but as a counter-formation. The season itself is designed to interrupt the rhythms that have been shaping us without our consent. Fasting disrupts our assumption that we deserve comfort on demand. Prayer disrupts our addiction to control. Confession disrupts the carefully curated selves we present to the world.
The great Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann understood this deeply. In Great Lent, he wrote that the Lenten journey is fundamentally a recovery of what it means to be fully human. It is not, he argued, a season of punishment or deprivation. It is a return; a slow, aching, beautiful return to the life God always intended for us. For Schmemann, our problem is not that we are too human but that we have forgotten how to be truly human. We have been so formed by the distortions of our culture, its frantic pace, its shallow substitutes for joy, its isolation masquerading as independence, that we’ve lost touch with the deeper currents of what it means to be creatures made in the image of God.
Lent, then, is not about becoming less. It’s about becoming real.
And here’s the part my inner achiever doesn’t love: this kind of formation cannot be optimized. You cannot white-knuckle your way into it. Dallas Willard used the phrase “indirect effort” to describe how spiritual transformation actually works; we don’t engineer our own change; we put ourselves in the path of grace and let God do what only God can do. Lent is forty days of putting ourselves in that path. Not performing. Not producing. Just… yielding.
That word—yielding—feels almost countercultural enough to be prophetic.
I want to be honest about how hard this is. I am wired to fix, to plan, to move. My anxious brain is already scanning for what could go wrong and building contingency plans. Yielding is not my native language. And I know many of you carry the same wiring; the sense that if you’re not doing something productive, you’re wasting time. That if you’re not improving, you’re falling behind.
But what if Lent is the season that whispers back: You don’t have to earn this.
What if the invitation isn’t to add another spiritual practice to your calendar but to create space—actual, breathing space—for God to do what only God can do in the quiet? What if the fasting and the prayer and the confession aren’t the point, but the conditions? The soil, not the seed?
And what if we did this together? Not as isolated spiritual athletes measuring our personal discipline, but as a community that holds each other in the slow, unglamorous work of being re-formed? The early church understood Lent as a communal journey. Catechumens preparing for baptism were surrounded by a congregation that fasted and prayed alongside them—not because they had to, but because formation was never meant to be a solo project. We belong to each other in this.
I keep coming back to that Ash Wednesday moment. My distracted mind. Her waiting face. The ashes that suddenly meant something I couldn’t manage or rush past.
I think that’s what Lent is, if we let it be. Not a program. Not a plan. But a face. A moment. An interruption we didn’t schedule that breaks through all our carefully constructed busyness and says: Be here. Be human. Be dust held in the hands of a God who makes all things new.
The ashes tell us two things at once, and both are true. You are dust. You are beloved. Lent is the season that holds those truths together without rushing to resolve the tension—because the tension is where formation happens. It’s in the space between our smallness and God’s immensity, between our mortality and God’s faithfulness, between Good Friday and Easter morning.
So this Lent, I’m not making a plan. I’m making room. I’m letting the counter-liturgy of this ancient season do its slow, subversive work on the parts of me that are still being formed by everything else. I’m showing up—to the prayers, to the silence, to the community—and I’m yielding.
Not because I’m good at it. But because I believe that the God who spoke over dust and called it very good is still speaking. Still forming. Still making us truly human together.
And Lent—if we stop trying to optimize it—might just be the season where we finally hear it. I’ll see you on Ash Wednesday, February 18th where we will together begin our journey to the cross.
From my heart,
Pastor Tara Beth Leach
Did Jeff remember to pick up Caleb from football lifting? What time does it get over? I need to check on that. And the sermon for Sunday still needs….
It was fleeting. But it was weighty. Because in that fraction of a second, I was somewhere else entirely. I was doing what I always do, what our culture has relentlessly trained me to do: managing, planning, staying ahead of the next thing. And I was doing it with ashes between my fingers.
Then someone stepped forward who stopped everything.
She had been on a cancer journey—months of treatment, months of our congregation holding her in prayer, months of hoping and aching and believing together. And now she was standing in front of me, forehead tilted, waiting for the words.
Remember that you are dust.
Suddenly the liturgy wasn’t ritual language anymore. It was almost too real to speak. The ashes on my thumb carried a different gravity. Dust wasn’t an abstraction. It was standing right in front of me, wearing the face of someone I’d been praying for.
And in the collision of those two moments—my distracted mental to-do list and her embodied mortality—something cracked open that I’m still sitting with as we enter this Lenten season again.
Here is what I think that crack revealed: I am more formed by the pace and noise of ordinary life than I am by the sacred rhythms I claim to inhabit. And if that’s true for me, the pastor presiding over the ashes, I have to wonder if it’s true for many of us.
Something is not right when Lent becomes another line item on our already-overstuffed calendars. Something is not right when we approach a season designed to undo us with the same productivity mindset we bring to everything else. We make our Lenten plans—what we’ll give up, what we’ll take on, which devotional we’ll follow—and without realizing it, we’ve turned a season of holy disruption into a spiritual self-improvement project.
We live in a culture that has liturgies of its own. Every notification on our phones is a call to worship. Every algorithm is a formation tool. Every scroll through social media is shaping our desires, our attention, our sense of what matters. James K.A. Smith puts it with uncomfortable precision in You Are What You Love: “We are liturgical animals—Loss of ritual does not mean the disappearance of worship, only the loss of the church’s ability to effectively form us. In short, if you are not being intentionally formed by the counter-liturgies of Christian worship, you are inevitably being formed by other liturgies—many of which you don’t even recognize.”
Read that again slowly. We are always being formed by something. The question isn’t whether formation is happening. It’s whether we’re aware of what’s doing the forming.
My wandering mind at the Ash Wednesday service wasn’t a moral failure. It was a diagnostic. It revealed what had been quietly, persistently shaping me—the relentless liturgy of productivity, of managing, of never quite being present to the moment I’m actually in. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
This is why Lent matters, not as a spiritual discipline challenge or a forty-day willpower test, but as a counter-formation. The season itself is designed to interrupt the rhythms that have been shaping us without our consent. Fasting disrupts our assumption that we deserve comfort on demand. Prayer disrupts our addiction to control. Confession disrupts the carefully curated selves we present to the world.
The great Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann understood this deeply. In Great Lent, he wrote that the Lenten journey is fundamentally a recovery of what it means to be fully human. It is not, he argued, a season of punishment or deprivation. It is a return; a slow, aching, beautiful return to the life God always intended for us. For Schmemann, our problem is not that we are too human but that we have forgotten how to be truly human. We have been so formed by the distortions of our culture, its frantic pace, its shallow substitutes for joy, its isolation masquerading as independence, that we’ve lost touch with the deeper currents of what it means to be creatures made in the image of God.
Lent, then, is not about becoming less. It’s about becoming real.
And here’s the part my inner achiever doesn’t love: this kind of formation cannot be optimized. You cannot white-knuckle your way into it. Dallas Willard used the phrase “indirect effort” to describe how spiritual transformation actually works; we don’t engineer our own change; we put ourselves in the path of grace and let God do what only God can do. Lent is forty days of putting ourselves in that path. Not performing. Not producing. Just… yielding.
That word—yielding—feels almost countercultural enough to be prophetic.
I want to be honest about how hard this is. I am wired to fix, to plan, to move. My anxious brain is already scanning for what could go wrong and building contingency plans. Yielding is not my native language. And I know many of you carry the same wiring; the sense that if you’re not doing something productive, you’re wasting time. That if you’re not improving, you’re falling behind.
But what if Lent is the season that whispers back: You don’t have to earn this.
What if the invitation isn’t to add another spiritual practice to your calendar but to create space—actual, breathing space—for God to do what only God can do in the quiet? What if the fasting and the prayer and the confession aren’t the point, but the conditions? The soil, not the seed?
And what if we did this together? Not as isolated spiritual athletes measuring our personal discipline, but as a community that holds each other in the slow, unglamorous work of being re-formed? The early church understood Lent as a communal journey. Catechumens preparing for baptism were surrounded by a congregation that fasted and prayed alongside them—not because they had to, but because formation was never meant to be a solo project. We belong to each other in this.
I keep coming back to that Ash Wednesday moment. My distracted mind. Her waiting face. The ashes that suddenly meant something I couldn’t manage or rush past.
I think that’s what Lent is, if we let it be. Not a program. Not a plan. But a face. A moment. An interruption we didn’t schedule that breaks through all our carefully constructed busyness and says: Be here. Be human. Be dust held in the hands of a God who makes all things new.
The ashes tell us two things at once, and both are true. You are dust. You are beloved. Lent is the season that holds those truths together without rushing to resolve the tension—because the tension is where formation happens. It’s in the space between our smallness and God’s immensity, between our mortality and God’s faithfulness, between Good Friday and Easter morning.
So this Lent, I’m not making a plan. I’m making room. I’m letting the counter-liturgy of this ancient season do its slow, subversive work on the parts of me that are still being formed by everything else. I’m showing up—to the prayers, to the silence, to the community—and I’m yielding.
Not because I’m good at it. But because I believe that the God who spoke over dust and called it very good is still speaking. Still forming. Still making us truly human together.
And Lent—if we stop trying to optimize it—might just be the season where we finally hear it. I’ll see you on Ash Wednesday, February 18th where we will together begin our journey to the cross.
From my heart,
Pastor Tara Beth Leach
P.S.
For information on Lent 2026, please see here.
Please note that service times and details are subject to change due to our construction. We thank you in advance for your grace!
For information on Lent 2026, please see here.
Please note that service times and details are subject to change due to our construction. We thank you in advance for your grace!