A Faith as Dry as Bones

TODAY: With this advice of Julian of Norwich, plan your weekend: “Be a gardener. Dig a ditch, toil and sweat, and turn the earth upside down and seek the deepness and water the plants in time. Continue this labor and make sweet floods to run and noble and abundant fruits to spring. Take this food and drink and carry it to God in your true worship.”

The valley of dry bones is a metaphor for the pervasive spiritual bankruptcy that Ezekiel observed in the “whole house of Israel” following the fall of the Northern Kingdom. Yet who among us has not experienced our own valley of dry bones?

You know those times in our faith journey where God seems very far away. At those times we can feel as powerless as that assortment of bones scattered across the valley floor.

Bones without tendons, ligaments and muscles are useless, unable to move or support the weight of a body. Ezekiel speaks to me in the spiritual valleys of my faith journey and commands me to put on “tendons and flesh.” And I obey because faith is not a feeling or a belief, but it is the act of responding to God’s call no matter how faint and distant.
In Verse 9 of Ezekiel 37, God commands Ezekiel to “Prophesy to the breath . . . O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.” It is our faithful response to God’s call, even at those times when God seems distant and far away, that prepares us to receive the gift of God’s breath that animates our lives and gives us power — the power of a risen Lord.

— Chip Taylor, MD