Or, even better, don’t.
That’s the message of Ash Wednesday: trying harder is pointless. Dying with your try hard pants on is still dying. And no one is going to really care what you’re wearing when you kick it—they’re gonna change your clothes anyways. You may think you’re winning in the short term, but in the end you can’t save your life. You can only lose it.
Every time you stop trying so hard, you accept your God-given limitations. Your humanness. Your mortality. Your true self.
There’s freedom in that. You’ll find you can really breathe in that atmosphere.
“Only death is usable in the new creation. Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to raise the living; and he especially did not come to raise the dying (remember Lazarus: John 11:1-16). As long as you and I are just hanging onto life, Jesus cannot do a thing for us. He saves the dead, not the moribund; the lost, not the detoured; the last, not the middle of the line. It is only when we go all the way into death—past living and past dying—that we can experience his power.”
Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment
In the new creation, dying is the only thing what will get you anywhere. The great humor of Christ’s death and resurrection is that he conquered Death not to immediately destroy it (that’s coming), but to turn an enemy into an ally while we wait for that final renewal of all things.
Ash Wednesday is the yearly reminder that putting your try hard pants on isn’t the answer—sometimes the best thing to do is to just stop trying so damn hard. Let yourself die; let the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead raise you to new life as well.
