Today, February 10, 2016, is Ash Wednesday. In New York, as I walk through Grand Central Station toward Forty-Second Street, I see many people bustling about with ashes inscribed on their foreheads – a reminder of the words from God to Adam after he and Eve had defied God’s one prohibition in the Garden of Eden: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).
This is the moment history began as we know it. Adam and Eve rebelled against their creator and as a result they were expelled from the protected Garden to enter a very different world of sin and death. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the time we reflect on the condition of our soul in relationship to the One who was sent by the Father to give each of us the opportunity to be saved from our inherent sinful nature.
Ash Wednesday has a very personal meaning for me. In 1991, I was with my family on Vieques, a small island seven miles off the eastern shores of Puerto Rico. In those days, most vacationers stayed away from the pristine beaches of Vieques because the U.S. Navy used sections of the island for bombing practice. Even so, about one third of the land was populated among two towns, Isabella Segondo on the Atlantic side and Esperanza on the Caribbean.
Wild horses roamed freely and the beaches were empty. Up in the hills, vacation homes shared the land with grazing cattle and tropical wildlife. Modern times in the form of glass covered hotels and teeming populations had not yet invaded this tiny slice of paradise; I hoped that it never would.
In 1991, Ash Wednesday fell on February 13th. It was my oldest son’s 11th birthday so I had two reasons to commemorate the day. I decided it would be good if as a family we had a short church service at home before the adventures of the day took over.
Looking through the Book of Common Prayer, I stumbled upon a section called “Daily Office Year One”. I had not seen these pages before because this section is located at the very end of the book. Within it I noticed the words “Ash Wednesday”. Little did I know, I had discovered the buried treasure I had been seeking for almost four years.
Rewind to 1987, as my company appeared to be doomed, I ducked in a church on Park Avenue in New York and said a short prayer seeking a way out of the financial trap I found myself in. I didn’t expect a reply, but a few weeks later I received a “command” to buy a Bible. This seemed to be the last thing I needed, but I was obedient to the vision and within an hour I had a beautiful new Bible. The only problem was I had no idea where to start, a problem I struggled with for a long time.
Now, in this most unlikely Caribbean setting, surrounded by my wife, my three sons and my daughter, I discovered the path to my future. Here was a definitive starting place, Ash Wednesday, for a daily encounter with the entire Bible over a two-year period. I started following the path laid out by the Daily Service: morning and evening Psalms, an Old Testament Passage, part of a Letter, and finally a selection from one of the Gospels. Following this biblical road map allowed me to read through most of the Bible in two years. What’s more, I would get to read all the Psalms seven times a year.
This fortunate discovery took place twenty-five years ago. Since then, no matter where I was, I would read the passages for that day every day of the year. And that joyful persistence led to the writing of Getting To Know Jesus, published on January 26, 2016.