Dust Thou Art
Dust Thou Art
By Neva Bodin
We bought a small farm in Minnesota. The interior of the house wasn’t finished when we bought it, but my carpenter husband was more than capable of completing the finish work.
However, when he never got to the inside framing of a bedroom window, as he was in business with his brother-in-law, building other people’s houses and barns, I took on the task. Let’s just say, when we sold the house, there was still a gap between the frame and the sill on one side of that window. The curtain hid it. Wasn’t my fault, the saw cut it too short!
With two young children, a farm, a part-time job, and little enthusiasm for housework, I might try my hand at carpentry, but I didn’t often dust places you couldn’t readily notice. Friends with two children, about the ages of ours, were visiting when that slothful habit was put on display.
Whatever possessed those kids to crawl under our bed where I hadn’t dusted, I couldn’t say. And whatever possessed them to come running into the living room where we adults were visiting and show off all the dust bunnies decorating their clothing and heads, had to be that little mischievous gremlin that appears at times.
I have mixed feelings about dust. It’s always there. It gathers on my shelves like it’s planning a family reunion, and our robot vacuum, Phoebe, has started sighing when she sees the living room. Last week, I went to dust the furniture and discovered I could write my name, a short novel, and the genealogies in Chronicles on an end table.
Dust can be valuable. God formed humans from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). Those kids might have interrupted someone coming or going under our bed!
King David said in Psalm 103:14, “He knows how we were made. He remembers that we are dust.”
Dust reminds me of my humble beginning and how each of us is miraculously created. God knows exactly what to do with dust. He breathes into it. He makes it come to life. (Those dust bunnies did look lively dangling off those kids!) When I try breathing into it, I sneeze.
“When the dust settles” isn’t just a cliché; it’s wisdom. Pause. Breathe. Pray. God does some of His best work when I stop floundering. And let the dust settle.
Jesus told the disciples that if a town wouldn’t receive them, they could move on without guilt and shake the dust off their feet (Matthew 10:14). That’s good advice. We don’t have to carry every rejection, expectation, or criticism like lint on our soul’s black sweater. Shake it off. We are not responsible to be everyone’s everything—only to be faithful to what God asks.
“Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1838.
One source says dust is mentioned in 35 books of the Bible. It must be important. My house isn’t neglected; it’s biblical! Now, if I could just explain that to Phoebe.
