Month: February 2018

A Speck of Dust

djpasternak

Ecclesiastics 3:11 NIV He has made everything beautiful in its time; He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of lent in a great number of Christian churches throughout the world. In the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church the priest makes a sign of the cross with ashes on the forehead of each person. According to tradition these are composed of palms burned from the previous year. As he does this the priest says: From dust you came and to dust you shall return.

So how can it be that someone completely consumed in a house or airplane fatality be resurrected on judgment day as promised by the Lord? I was thinking of this and what came to mind was that God is able to find the tiniest piece of dust of our body and make a new and perfect eternal body that is uniquely our own.

After all we began as a single fertilized cell the thickness of a strand of hair. And in a process that totally astounds the mind, we became a person who would live and die and go back to dust or ashes and as promised be resurrected and live forever.

Ashes are a perfect way to begin the forty day journey to Easter and be reminded of our destination which is eternity.

A Time to Write

djpasternak

dove

“There is a time for everything under heaven…”  Ecclesiastics 3

From the beginning of my life until I left rural northeast PA after college, I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents.  In June 1943 my mother brought me directly from the hospital to live on her parents’ farm because Daddy was overseas, a soldier in WWII.  After three years he came home and only then did we leave the farmhouse.  My bond with my grandparents continued to be strong and after Grandpa had a stroke, I stayed with them summers and on weekends during the school year.

In one way I believe this proved to be beneficial in allowing me hours alone to ponder and also write down my thoughts expressed in poems and stories and such.

At the age of eight, I wrote a speech about being the first woman president of the United States and proudly read it to group of relatives.  My main premise was giving everything to everyone.  Sound familiar?  My politics soon changed—influenced by my staunch Republican grandmother.

The point of this meandering is a time factor.  Not that I stopped writing entirely but that I never returned to the early place of quiet hours pursuing the creative ideas flowing from my being and taking pen to paper.

Now is my season once again of “a time to write.”