Things just fall apart.
That is how every story ends.
It doesn’t matter who or what or when, the end of the story is that things just fall apart.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Ashes ashes we all fall down.
We all die.
You are going to die.
I am going to die.
Even all the stars in the sky die, every single one.
Things fall apart. End of story.
Time is short.
What do we do with the time we have left?
Lent.
Ashes rubbed in our faces.
Our mortality and the waste we have made of life rubbed in our faces.
So little time and we use it for what?
All those chances to live in love, to live with the freedom of forgiveness, so many chances wasted.
We can’t seem to help ourselves.
The power of sin.
It isn’t about breaking rules on some list so that God no longer likes us.
It is about living without God, losing touch with the love that fills life and that holds all things together. That is the power of sin.
It’s about all the love that we wasted, neglected, rejected, betrayed, forsook, abandoned, forgot and withheld.
That is sin. That is the end of the story.
The story of God even ends in death, the death on the cross.
Or is it? The end?
There it is.
We are running out of time to figure that one out.
Is there one story that doesn’t end in everything falling apart?
Is there one story where the love that fills all things and holds all things together, is there one story where love gathers everything back together again?
Do we have time to live that story? To become part of that book? That Gospel?
Do we have time to live in love rather than apart?
Do have time to start over?
There it is. Lent. So we begin. The right beginning of repentance.