Pastoral Letter: From Dust to Grace - A Lenten Invitation to Abide
Dear Simsbury UMC family,
If, while reading this letter, you suddenly realized, “Wait—today is Valentine’s Day?” and felt prompted to reach out to someone you love, then perhaps my small intention has already been fulfilled. Love often begins not with grand plans, but with a quiet awakening of the heart.
Soon, we enter the season of Lent.
On Ash Wednesday, we will hear the words, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That confession humbles us, yet it also steadies us. We were formed from dust, and yet we bear a dignity that dust alone could never claim. We are made in the image of God. Fashioned from earth, we carry the breath of God within us.
Lent, then, is not a season for self-rejection, but for remembering who we are. It is less about proving something and more about recalling whose love holds us. And this kind of remembering rarely survives on thought alone. It needs a rhythm we can return to—small, steady moments that turn our eyes back toward God and gently re-center the heart.
Prayer restores that rhythm.
Prayer is the space where we turn ourselves toward God once more. It is where we dwell in God’s embrace and presence, and remember that we are loved before we prove anything. Our words do not need to be polished. Our emotions do not need to be sorted. Simply remaining before God is already communion.
This Lent, we will name our shared journey “ABIDE—Learning to Remain in Prayer.” Not as a call to try harder, but as an invitation to dwell more deeply in love. In the wilderness, when we feel unsettled, in moments of beginning again, in seasons of thirst, when clarity eludes us, when we are weary and short of breath—God does not drive us forward with pressure. God holds us close.
To abide in love does not mean living in constant emotional intensity. It means, in the ordinary pace of daily life, learning to turn our eyes back toward God. In conversations, in decisions, in moments when the noise of the world feels overwhelming, we remember: I am held within the love of God. Prayer helps that truth become something we can breathe again.
Beloved,
We are dust, yet we are not without worth.
We are fragile, yet we are not forsaken.
We are earth, yet we bear the image of God.
May prayer, this season, be received again not as an obligation but as a means of grace. In prayer, we receive the love God first extends to us, and we learn how to remain within it. And may that love not stop with us, but flow outward into the life of our community.
May this prayer not remain enclosed within our own hearts.
May your families and friends, your neighbors near and far, all who share breath on this earth as children of God, and the whole of God’s creation, encounter the love of Jesus Christ even now.
And may the Holy Spirit hold us within that love, shape us through it, and lead us to care for wounded neighbors and a weary creation with tenderness and courage.
As we remain in that love,
may it flow through us into the world God loves.
Grace and peace,
DH