Lent begins with dust and ashes. We start this time of intensive preparation for baptism or realigning our lives with the vows of the baptismal covenant acknowledging our human limitations. We remember we are dust and to dust we will return. Our efforts in this life will one day be reduced to ashes. And in the meantime, we have deeply ingrained habits marked by sin, stained by selfishness, and resistant to our own efforts to change them.