Ash Wednesday Meditation from Frederick Buechner

IN MANY CULTURES there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of
each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe
the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth
of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan,
Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days
asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent,
Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means
to be themselves.

If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God
or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?
When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it
that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?
If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people
who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five
words or less?

Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you
would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest
to remember? Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that,
if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?
If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?
To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to
hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are
becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty
depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes
are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.