The Dark Devotional: Fifth Sunday in Lent: The Dust on Her Lips

Click here for the complete Mass readings for March 13, 2016

Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new! (Isaiah 43)

I don’t much like being told not to remember. To forget about the past and only look forward to what lies ahead.

There’s the God who makes the way in the desert, yes, and turns death into resurrection too. But there’s a God of parched land and never-quenched thirst too, and simply because he suddenly stretches a pool of water in front of me, I’m supposed to forget my dry and cracked lips?

When the LORD brought back the captives of Zion, we were like men dreaming.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with rejoicing. (Psalm 126)

I’d rather live in the land of rememberers than in the land of blind dreamers, the land of people whose faith supposes that because God always wants the best for them, they will get what feels best.

I think the ones living possessed by Jesus might just look a bit possessed, thrown about in the wrestling match between who they once were and who they want to one day be, their lips foaming in the effort to tame the past and become the eternal future.

Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. (John 8: 1-11)

She was bowed down, nose to the dirt, when Jesus stepped forward, placed himself between her and her death sentence. He lifts her up and tells her to go on her way and sin no more.

Maybe this is what it looks like to walk ahead into the life of the resurrection, where there’s no going back down into the dirt.

Don’t look back.

I guess this is the invitation, to walk out of the desert rather than looking for the pool in the dry land.

But maybe I’ll be a little stronger of step if, on the way, I remember the taste of dust on my lips.

Colleen C. Mitchell is the author of the forthcoming book Who Does He Say You Are? Women Transformed by Christ in the Gospels (Servant, 2016). She’s wife to Greg and mother to five amazing sons here on earth and five precious little ones in heaven. Colleen and Greg are foreign missionaries in Costa Rica, where they run the St. Francis Emmaus Center, a ministry that welcomes indigenous mothers into their home to access medical care. She works out what it means to trust Jesus, grieve well, and live a raw faith at her blogBlessed Are the Feet.