You are going to die.
It might be decades from now or it might be today, but death will find you in the end.
How did it feel to read those words? Did they make you think about your life differently?
The Church gives us ashes at the beginning of Lent to remind us of our mortality. The minister of the ashes has the option of saying "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." This sacramental is a memento mori (Latin for "remember you will die"). The Church isn't being morbid. If we forget death, we forget that the way we live our lives matters. It has temporal and eternal consequences for us, our families, other Christians, and the world around us.
The other optional exhortation the minister of ashes can use shows us what to do about our impending death: "Repent, and believe in the Gospel." We cannot avoid physical death, but by God's grace we can avoid spiritual death, i.e. mortal sin, especially dying unrepentant.
So don't become a casualty of spiritual warfare. Receive your ashes, remember that you are dust, repent, and live according to the Gospel. "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23).
