Marked

We went to my daughter's school on Tuesday night for a Fat Tuesday celebration and, of course, when you gather lots and lots of kids in a gymnasium with pizza, sweets, and a D.J., it's a jolt to your senses (at least to my 42-year-old senses). One of the highlights for our kids--as it often is at an event like this--was getting their faces painted. I was grumbling a bit because the line was long and the artists seemed to be taking their sweet time about it, but I must say that these were some pretty cool designs. Caroline had a kind-of Mardi Gras design and Ethan had a dragon on his face. There was no way they wanted to wash these marks off when we got home so they slept on towels over their pillows that night. Ethan was a particularly careful sleeper, I think, and may have slept on his back the whole night.

Yesterday hundreds of people were walking around downtown with a different design on their faces, or, specifically, their foreheads. Ash Wednesday. Many people heard the sobering yet important words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." I was marked with my ash cross over the noon hour and received a few double takes, including a woman on the L who asked about it.

The kids on Tuesday night and the many yesterday were all marked for different reasons and the passage I was reading this morning really jumped out at me as a great text to relate to these marks. Romans 12:9-21 is often entitled "Marks of the True Christian" and it's a powerful list of entreaties written by a man named Paul. Depending on how you break them up, there are 25 or so ways to measure whether we have these marks. Let love be genuine. Do not lag in zeal. Be patient in suffering. Persevere in prayer. I think I may use this as a key text during these next 40-plus days of Lent as I wonder about the marks in/on my heart and whether people can see them as easily as a dragon or an ash cross.