Can these bones live?

A few days ago I was skyping with a missionary friend I hadn’t seen in several years. He said, “I was looking at your website, and I couldn’t help thinking that most missionaries don’t manage to survive on the mission field for twenty years, but you’ve done more than survive; you seem to have flourished. Maybe sometime you could share how you did that.”

For some reason, those words have been playing over and over in my head, perhaps because of the word ‘flourished.’ “Am I flourishing? Or am I just surviving?” I asked myself. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of myself, so I asked the Lord. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear His answer, so of course I didn’t hear anything (it’s kind of hard to hear when your hands are over your ears!). I was afraid He’d say, “Yep. That website is cheerful and that’s a great photo of you looking so joyful, but hey, let’s face it – you’re pretty washed out.” I thought of these twenty very full years on the field, looked at the fact that I’m over fifty and feel tired much of the time, allowed the Enemy to remind me (again) of all the health hazards in my DNA, and my spirit started flagging – down down down: Maybe I’d better face reality and get out of the way and let younger, stronger people carry on.

Yet I hadn’t really heard from the Lord yet. So I asked Him tonight, this time with my ears unstopped. He said, “Dry bones.”

“Oh, no! It’s worse than I thought! Dry bones?! Boo-hoo! I'm not even surviving!". Not being one to let go of a bullet until I’ve swallowed it whole, I decided to take a closer look at Ezekiel 37. God would probably amplify that thought for me, show me where I’ve gone wrong, and then maybe give me another year or two of usefulness, however menial and insignificant (yes, I was getting pretty pathetic). I turned very slowly to the famous dry bones passage, and this is what I read:

“The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

The first word that caught my eye was ‘valley.’ My house is in a valley, and when the rains come, water rushes down the hill to our property. The little road next to our home turns into a small creek. Water . . . Spirit. I might be in a valley, but valleys hold water. Even if the valley is filled with dry bones, it’s still a valley, and it’s fertile and green and filled with life-giving water. I wondered if those dry bones in Ezekiel were lying around on beautiful lush grass with the sound of a waterfall nearby. I started feeling a little more hopeful.

And then the words, “Can these bones live?” shouted at me. I needed to know, too. A person wouldn’t even have bothered to ask that question: of course bones can’t live! What a ridiculous thought! A dry bone coming back to life? But God asked, and when God asks something which seems impossible, it somehow nurtures hope in our souls and spirits. Besides, now I was asking, too. “Lord, is it over? Or . . . could they . . . might they . . .will they live again?”

And of course they did! God put flesh and skin on them, and then He breathed into them, and they rose to their feet and became “an exceedingly great army.” That’s when I realized that the dry bones in the valley weren’t necessarily mine. Even though a valley is fertile and wet, it can also symbolize a place of separation from God. The mountain is the place where prophets meet with the Lord; “down in the valley” is the symbolic place of sin and sadness.

So this is what I heard the Lord saying to me, “Suzy, for twenty years you have been living and ministering in a valley, in a place where there is poverty, despair and injustice, a place where there are many dry bones. Like David in Psalm 22, you have been ‘poured out like water,’ and your strength is ‘dried up like a potsherd.’ You have wanted to see those dry bones live. You have wanted to see them with real flesh, and especially with the breath of God within them. You have tried to help My people get on their feet and join My army. In the process, you have become so spent that maybe sometimes you feel like one of them – but you are NOT a dry bone. My living water is within you. You are My prophet in the midst of the bones, My voice speaking hope and life to them. Stop listening to the voice that wants you to lie down and join the dead. Yes, you are older and you will never have the physical strength you once had, but My breath is strong within you.”

That isn’t a direct quote, by the way. I don’t necessarily hear from the Lord in that way, but I know that’s the message He has for me: “Live! Love! Let my Spirit breathe freely through your life! And keep calling to the dry bones! Tell them to rise up in the Name of Jesus!”

Isn’t that a beautiful message? I’m sharing it because I know I’m not the only one who sometimes “grows weary in welldoing,” and begins to doubt the Lord and start listening to the discouraging voice of the Enemy. We are called to go to the valley, and sometimes dwell there so that the dry bones can live – but the Lord will not allow us to join the hopelessness of the spiritually dead. He sends rivers of Living Water and His own breath of the Holy Spirit to keep His life flowing into and through our lives.

“Can these bones live?” Hallelujah – not just live – They can flourish!