I recently spoke to a woman who asked me if, when I went through a mild bout of depression last fall, I ever felt angry at God. I considered the question seriously, analyzing that time in my memory, what I wrote, how I prayer, how I spoke, and how I viewed God then versus now. I remembered that sense I often get of leaning against a sturdy tower with arms. [God is the tower, and sometimes I feel the arms reach around me in comfort. But the tower will never turn me away. (John 6:37; Psalm 32:7)] I didn’t think of that image much which I was depressed, but my fundamental understanding of God still matches it.

“No,” I told her. “I don’t think I was.”

We talked about ways we do place blame, and she mentioned that several people she knows want to have it out with Eve in heaven, and that she expects there will be a line.

Now, I personally hope that the heaven-bound will have let go of their complaints, no longer seeking restitution for the wrongs committed against them. However, I’ve been imagining that scene a lot.

Eve and Adam are standing beneath trees in the “New Eden” neighborhood of heaven, a line of people stretching out past the horizon, all waiting to air their complaints with the first people about their sufferings on Earth. By far, the longer line is Eve’s. People want to vent at her, blame her, and Eve takes it with gentle patience. Eve, who had no understanding of the depth and breadth of the consequences of her sin, explains again and again, apologizes again and again. We, at least, know what sin and death are. We rarely accurately predict the consequences of our own sins, but we have a much better idea than Eve did. And Eve didn’t act alone. Adam was with her, in charge of communicating God’s single rule to his wife, and is not recorded as saying anything to her as she sinned. And, when she handed him some of the fruit, he sinned it, too. And I’ll bet most people in his line just want to shake his hand.

One could argue that no sinner ever suffered as much as Eve. First, she experienced perfection without care or worry, then was driven from her home to a life marked (though not dominated by) pain, danger, and regret. Furthermore, she is the one blamed for everything from murders to lust to idolatry to menstrual cramps to natural disasters to cancer. And yes, she did introduce sin to the world, but her husband is not innocent.

If there is a literal Eve and a literal Adam who I might could visit and speak with in heaven, I would join the line. But once I arrived at the front, I think I would just hug her. And if Adam’s line wasn’t too long, I’d get into it for the sake of fairness. Hopefully I won’t be tempted to tell him off—but if people are telling Eve off then Adam should get his fair share, too. But I hope I’d just hug him. He suffered, too. They lost their relationship with God, their home, their innocence, their child Able, and ultimately their lives. And they are my family. In so many ways, even if the first humans look more like Lucy than me, I am just like them. I am a sinner. I do the wrong things. Knowingly, intentionally, I hurt others, hurt myself, try to hurt God. And, like the first humans, I will one day die.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, which is the 40-day period leading to Easter. During Lent, we consider Jesus’ journey to the the cross, the instrument of his torture and death even though he had literally never done a single thing wrong. (Mary, his mother, would likely have disagreed. Especially that time Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem and didn’t tell anyone.) We also consider our own mortality and sinfulness. The ashes themselves symbolize both death and repentance.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Dust and ash (sin and death) are the final equalizers. The only difference that will remain is what we did with our sin. Did we look at the wrongs of our lives—the systematic ignoring of our Creator, the pretending we are in control, our imagined versions of fairness—and ask God for forgiveness? Did we ask for changed hearts that beat a new rhythm that brings peace and healing to all the world? Did we sit down and say, “I don’t know it all and I’m not in control and I’m okay with God being in control instead”?

Remember: we are dust. And to dust we will return.