Love and Dust

© Staci Stallings

I’ve been a Catholic all my life, so at present I’ve personally heard the Ash Wednesday admonishment 37 times. As the ashes are placed on your forehead, you are told, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

About three weeks ago, I was writing a book, and the character remembered what her grandmother used to tell her: “Remember you are love and to love you shall return.”

When I went to Ash Wednesday Mass, I thought about these two sayings and wondered how can one be true if the other is also? Did I have to disregard the first’s warning in order to embrace the second's promise? All day long I thought about it, and finally it dawned on me what God was telling me through these two sayings.

Too many of us on this earth believe that what we do is important. We strive to “make a difference” in our world. We pursue educations and then jobs so that what we do will matter. Unfortunately, we’re missing the point.

It is not what we do that matters. It’s what He already did. The day that Christ carried my sins up Calvary’s mountain, allowed Himself to be nailed to a tree, bled, suffered and died for me—that’s what matters, and in truth, that’s all that matters. Whether I get my living room cleaned or not is really inconsequential in comparison.

“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Remember that those things you are doing today to increase yourself are dust. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, they are smoke.

However, and here is where life gets interesting, you do not have to be dust. You do not have to resign yourself to smoke. In Christ, through Christ, you can have love. You can be love if you will retrain your focus from yourself to Him. Do you let Him order your day, or do you insist on planning your own? Do you let Him control you, or do you seek to control Him—putting Him off until prayer time for example? Do you turn your God walkie-talkie on and listen for His messages to you, or do you do like a friend of mine who said, “I thought we just lived. I didn’t know there were lessons!”

There are ultimately two things in this life: Love and Fear. Fear is an illusion, a lie of Satan. Love is real. Love is all that is real. Everything else is dust.

When the great entrepreneur J.D. Rockefeller died, a reporter asked his accountant, “How much did J.D. leave behind?” To which the accountant replied, “All of it.” He left the dust of this world behind and took only the love he had for God and for others to his eternity.

As my sister said, “All we get to keep is the love we have shared with others, with God, and with ourselves.”

So, I wonder how often I am dust and how often I am love. Reality is, I can be either one.

The priest on Ash Wednesday pointed this out very nicely. He said (I paraphrase), “Which is it? The Bible says not to hide your light under a bush, but then it says, ‘When you do a good deed, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’ It says, ‘Feed my sheep,’ but it also says, ‘What you do in secret, your Father sees.’ So which is it?”

I propose to you this points out the dust or love question nicely for the reality is, it is BOTH and it is NEITHER. Both when why you are doing it is for love. Neither if you are doing it for yourself. Pride is the first deadly sin for a reason. Pride in self and your own accomplishments will get you a handful of dust in a hurry.

When you are working from love and really letting Christ work through you in love, it matters not if your actions are public or private—they are blessed because God blesses what is Holy. If He did it, it’s Holy. If you did it (even for Him), it is not. God does not bless our effort if our effort is motivated by our own self-interest (and that might even mean if we’re trying to get into Heaven because of it).

For example, let’s say that you decide: In order to get to Heaven, I have to read my Bible every night and visit the sick once a week. So you read your Bible every night and you visit the sick once a week. Your goal in both exercises is your own benefit—you’re doing them to get to Heaven (or if you’re a fear-based Christian to save yourself from Hell). The problem is this is smoke and will count for naught on the other side.

Now, let’s say instead that a stranger has dropped his books all over the sidewalk. You are in a hurry to get to work, but you stop and help him because he needs help. I submit to you, that this action will survive the grave and accompany you to Heaven. You have extended love, and love lasts. Yes, it was a small thing, took no more than two minutes, but I believe it will outweigh all those other things you did in order to gain something for yourself.

Look for those moments to give love to someone else. Look for those moments when listening is all that is required. Look for those moments when Christ nudges you to help, to listen, to answer, to hear, to run, to walk, to be. Let God who ordered the whole universe order your day as well. Let love be your guiding light and realize that everything else is dust.

The more you remember you are love and to love you shall return, the more you will be living with Christ as your focus and with God in your heart. Those are the things that matter. Get that right, and everything else will follow.

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