I am reading the Hebrew Bible this morning. I am in Ezekiel's story. "The LORD's power overcame me," he says, "he led me and set me down in the middle of a certain valley." This valley was full of bones, dry, deserted. It hit me: sometimes our way forward is through dead places.
Sometimes God does the work in us and around us by taking us, as God did earlier with the Children of Israel, around places of struggle. Sometimes God does the work in us and around us by taking us, as with Ezekiel, through the places of struggle. We just don't know.
Ezekiel is in this dead places. He didn't choose to be there. He didn't ask to be there. But God has him there. God asks, "Human one, can these bones live again?" Ezekiel responds, "LORD God, only you know." Haven't we felt like that? God asks things of us and we have no answers.
This is the part that shouted me. "Prophesy over these bones, and say to them," God tells Ezekiel. "..you will live again." Ezekiel's sees death, but God sees life. God is in effect telling him and us: what you can't see with your eyes, you can proclaim with your mouth.
"I prophesied," Ezekiel says, "just as I was commanded." To prophesy is not simply to be predictive of the future but it is also to call out life to things that died in the past to live in the present. I may not be able to articulate it or explain it but I know it can live again.
In this story, things don't just change at once. It is a process. God has to tell Ezekiel to keep on speaking. The more he speaks, the more things come to life around him. He couldn't stop death, but he could speak life. He didn't have the answers, but he did have a little faith.
This is Ezekiel's story, it belongs to him, to Israel, but also can be our testimony who are far removed: even when I and the people around me don't believe, God believes in us and believes we have inside of us the things that will make our world come alive. That is good news.
I am reminded of Baby Suggs, in Toni Morrison's Beloved, prophesying: "Here in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken, and break again. You got to love it."
She, like Ezekiel, reminds us that we have to speak to those places in ourselves and in others that has been devalued and has died. We have to speak those things forgotten. There is love to be found and life to be had. God is saying to us and through us: You will live again.
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