Breathing Holiness

Breathing Holiness
Psalm 51:1-17
 
God, make a fresh start in me, shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.  Don’t throw me out with the trash, or fail to breathe holiness in me.  Bring me back from gray exile, put a fresh wind in my sails! Give me a job teaching rebels your ways so the lost can find their way home.  - Psalm 51:10-13 (MSG) 
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When I think of Ash Wednesday, I think of a beauty that has been tainted, dirtied, or covered.  We see this each winter as we watch to snow fall in all its pure beauty.  It quietly blows down to the earth and covers it like a blanket.  However, as the days pass it either becomes dirtied by the activity of cars and people or it melts and appears more like mud. Its beauty and purity is not viewed in the same way.
 
Sometimes I see us like this snow.  Each day we receive a fresh start.  The psalmist asks for God to make a fresh start in us—to do something new and creative as God changes the chaos of this life into a holy life with God.  God breathes holiness into our pores, our flesh, our core, our spirit.
 
On this day we remember that we are infinite people living in finite bodies who do sin and fail to follow in God’s ways.  We are also reminded that God does reach out to us, wanting us to find our way home, our way back to God.   
 
PRAYER:  Lord, may we look to You, our Lenten Hope, that can be found in the Your love and through following in the footsteps of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  May we seek God’s love as we experience ourselves breathing in and living into  the Holiness of our Almighty God.  Amen.