The bones stand up

Once, in the deep of the wilderness, God set Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones and asked the cruel-seeming question: can these bones live? And Ezekiel, who could not say yes to the evidence and dared not say no to the LORD, handed it back: Lord, you know. This is the day the answer comes. God tells him to prophesy, and as the words leave his mouth there is a sound, a rattling, and across the whole valley bone finds bone. Sinew threads them, flesh climbs over them, skin draws shut. And yet they are not alive; they lie there, whole and still, bodies without breath, which is somehow worse than scattered bone. So God sends the prophet to call the breath itself from the four winds, and the breath comes into them, and they live, and stand up on their feet, an exceedingly great army. Look at the distance covered. From very many and very dry to a host standing upright and breathing. The deadest valley the prophet could be shown does not get tidied or improved. It is raised. God did not answer the question with an argument. He answered it with resurrection.

There was a day you stood over your own valley and could not lie about the bones. The dried-up calling, the relationship gone to powder, the faith you feared was finished — you looked honestly, refused the hollow yes, and handed the verdict back: Lord, you know. This is the payoff of that honesty. The God to whom you handed the impossible question is the God who breathes on dust until it stands. He does not specialize in improving dying things; He specializes in raising dead ones. Optimism says the bones were not really so dry; faith admits they were bone, and waits for the breath anyway. The breath came. It always was His to send and never yours to manufacture, and that is precisely why it could come at all — resurrection is the craft of God, not the achievement of the determined. What you gave up for dead was not beyond Him. The honest no you refused to speak was the right restraint, because He had a yes you could not have seen.