Ash Wednesday is dissonant. It is jarring. It makes me wriggle in my chair and want to cower behind the cushions at the same time.

I stand, in a beautiful church shimmering with gold, and have cold, damp ashes thumbed onto my forehead. They were made earlier in the week in my back garden, smoldering in the barbeque as the joy-filled palm crosses disintergrated into black, crispy mulch.

Remember that you are dust.

My children stand beside me, quiet because everyone around them looks different to a normal Sunday, quivering with pent-up energy made worse by knowing they cannot let it out. The solemnity hangs in the air, unexplained, inviting and incomprehensible.

To dust you will return.

My husband turns from me and gently, hand shaking just a touch, marks the cross on the forehead of each child, remembering their own mortality whilst doing everything he can to forget it. At least, that’s what I assume he’s thinking; I know it’s there in my mind.

I stumble back into the real world, awkwardly engaging in conversation when all I really want to do is be still, and breathe, and try to assimilate the fact that I have just had my own mortality literally pasted onto my forehead. In that moment, there is no turning away from the fact that this is me, and I will die, and that is part of why I am here.

Walking down the street, the dissonance follows me. Eyes do a double-take on seeing my forehead. Should I tell her she has something on her face? Is she one of those crazy people? No one mentions it. Everyone sees it.

I leave the church dreaming that this year, everything will be different. I will be thoughtful, and helpful, and kind every day through Lent. I will give up the food that is bad for me, and take up an act of kindness every day. I will pray more, and read the Bible every day, and come out of it knowing exactly what God wants of me.

All too soon, life intrudes again. Tomorrow is World Book Day, and so there is a Paleontologist to be transformed into Hermione Granger, and a Cowgirl who has decided that in fact, when she grows up, she wants to be a Tiger (because the Tiger is very naughty, and eats all the food in the cupboards, and I want to be like that too). Marking needs to be done. Meetings need to be had. Washing needs to be hung out to dry.

Usually, by this point in the evening, my pious intentions have already crumbled into dust. This year, the process started early, as I didn’t even make it to the Ash Wednesday service; the car had a flat tyre, and absorbed All Time into an abyss. So instead, in this pause when the wand is away, the tiger costume is hanging up, tomorrow’s marking is just about finished, and the house is asleep, I am trying to reach that point of stopping, and breathing, and waiting.

Because Ash Wednesday is not just dissonant because it reminds you that you will die, standing there in the midst of the busyness of everyday life. It is also jarring because it throws the knowledge that, in fact, none of this is about me, right into my face. Lent is not a sanctified excuse to lose weight. Nor is it the chance to answer those big questions about where my life is going or what might happen next to me. It’s not a time for self-congratulation, or self-absorption, or starting new projects.

Lent is a time when we remember what it is like to be lost and alone. It is a time of wandering through the desert, not knowing yet how the story will end, and having to trust that everything will happen as it should. It is a time of madness, and forgetting, and self-discovery. It is a time for remembering what it is to be homeless, and hopeless, and hungry. But more than that, more than anything else, it is a time of waiting. It is a time of listening. It is a time of holding on while the storm crashes by, because only then, in the resulting stillness, can the voice of God be heard.

And so, tonight, I am waiting.