On Dust and Beginnings

Starting a Substack at year's end

The end of the year brings me to contemplation, the kind of bone-marrow dive that leaves me mostly considering dust, molecular decay, and how my mortal flesh moves ever closer to my fine, granular, and ephemeral end. I wish I could say that knowing I am aging and that I will die—probably sooner rather than later, given the average age of death for women in the US—instantly reorganizes my priorities. If I’ve learned anything with time and experience, knowing is not the same as doing, or changing, or even being, with all due respect to Descartes.

At the end of this year, 2022, I’ve realized a few truths. One is that I need to write, if only to better understand those truths that God would have me know. Writing is a process, like living and learning any kind of skill, that at its best hones knowing into doing, and likewise doing—the act of writing—into a further kind of knowing. Not everyone needs this, but I do, and so here I am, starting a Substack after blogging and writing for different periodicals over the years. It feels hubristic, but I’ve also learned that keeping a paper journal isn’t enough for me—I need the impetus of knowing others will read what I’m considering, even if it’s just my husband and mother (hi, mom!). Another is that Christians need encouragement, and in this atomized age, that means some encouragement comes from online sources. In part, I hope to write here for what I seek, and will continue to seek, from other Christians.

So this is a start. I’ll end here with words from Martin Luther, quoted in The Treasury of Daily Prayer on this the fourth day of Christmas:

When I am about to depart from this life, I support myself with this consolation that I believe in God’s Son. And yet I am buried; I am eaten by worms; I am consumed by the most foul rottenness, as Job says (Job 17:14): “I said to the rottenness, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worms, ‘My mother',’ or ‘My sister.’” Here I do not discern God’s plan, that although I die and rot away, I must at some time be revived. But God has promised and said (cf. John 14:19): “You will live, for I live, and you will live. I am the Lord your God!” How? In eternal life and with a more beautiful and brighter body than the body of the sun. At present I do not see or feel this, but I believe it and suffer this very short delay. For this life has already been prepared, and in the meantime the crown of the kingdom and glory is being prepared “which the Lord will give me on that Day, the righteous Judge,” as Paul says (2 Tim. 4:8), “and not only to me, but also to those who love His coming.”