Can These Bones Live

It was a woman on a plastic chair at a midweek thing she does not normally go to, and it was not even a real question, it was one of those questions people ask to be encouraging.

She said: so what has God been doing in you these last few years?

And this woman, who is fifty, and who is fine, and who runs a good life, said something about being busy at work, and the moment passed, and everybody moved on, and she has not been able to put it down since.

Eight years. It has been eight years since the divorce, and she has a phrase for those years too, which is the dry part, and she says it the way you say a thing you have made your peace with.

Except she has not, and the reason she knows is that a woman on a plastic chair asked her a soft question and she went blank and then she lied.

Here is what she could not say. That she does not think God has been doing anything in her these last eight years. That she has been going. That she has been at everything and helped with most of it and been the person people ask, and that inside all of that she has felt like a room with the furniture taken out. That when people talk about what God is teaching them in a season she has nothing whatsoever to report, and that she has assumed, for about six years now, that this means something is wrong with her that she does not have the words for.

She sits in her car afterwards in the church lot with her keys in her hand. There is a lamp over by the gate that has been coming on and going off for two years and nobody has fixed it, and it does its thing.

The question keeps coming back and she keeps walking away from it, and that is the pattern, and it has been the pattern for six years.

You have that question. Somebody asked you something gentle and you produced a sentence to get past it, and the sentence has been sitting in you ever since. And here is the strange mercy at the middle of this: there is a prophet in the Bible who got asked a question exactly like it, by God, standing in the worst possible place, and what he said back is not what anybody expects.

Lord, you know

I have to be careful here, and I am going to be more careful than usual, because there is a version of this that arrives with a forecast. The bones are going to rattle. Your season is turning. Watch what God does next. I am not going to say any of that. Nobody talking to you about God has been authorized to schedule anything, and a forecast that does not arrive does more damage than the drought did.

Ezekiel is set down in the middle of a valley full of bones, and the text goes out of its way to tell you they were very many and they were very dry. And God asks him a question: Son of man, can these bones live? (Ezekiel 37:3).

Now, think about the options. He could say yes, of course, since nothing is impossible with the God asking the question, which would be the correct answer and would also be a man producing a confident sentence to get past a hard question. He could say no, look at them, which would be honest and small. He says neither.

He says: O Lord God, thou knowest.

That is the whole answer, and God does not correct it, and does not call it weak faith, and moves straight on to the next instruction. The prophet declines to produce a verdict about a valley he cannot read, and hands the knowing back to the only person who has it.

You are allowed to hand a question back without an answer, and that is not unbelief. That is not me making the passage easy; Ezekiel 37:3 records the prophet's answer word for word and the Holy Spirit who preserved it did not attach a rebuke, which means a woman who cannot say what God has been doing is standing where a prophet already stood.

And notice what happens next. God does not answer the question either. He gives Ezekiel something to do, which is to speak to the bones, and the bones are still bones while he opens his mouth.

And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.Ezekiel 37:3

Dry is a description, not a diagnosis

Now the thing that has actually been happening for six years.

Somewhere in the second or third year she moved from I have nothing to report to something is wrong with me, and that move is the whole injury, and it happened without evidence and without anybody present to object.

You have been describing a condition and hearing it as a charge. Psalm 63:1 has David saying my soul thirsteth for thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, and that is in the Bible as worship and not as a confession of failure; the Spirit who inspired that psalm did not treat the dryness as a fault in the man.

This is yours right now, with the keys in your hand: eight years that were never evidence against you. Romans 8:1 says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and now covers the dry part; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has been in a room with the furniture taken out.

The bones are still bones while you speak

Let me stay with the valley, because there is a detail there that matters for a woman who has nothing to report.

God tells him to prophesy to the bones, and he does, and the noise and the shaking come afterward. At the moment of obedience nothing has changed. He is a man talking out loud to a floor full of dry bones and looking, if anybody had been watching, completely ridiculous.

That is what showing up for eight years with nothing to report actually is, and it is not the absence of faith, it is the least decorated form of it there is.

You were being faithful in the driest stretch, and nobody was there to see it. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and the love you have showed toward His name, and forgetting is the one thing that verse rules out; the Holy Spirit keeps that record and He has not lost eight years of it.

Fruit is not output, and eight dry years are where the difference is sharpest. Output is what could be reported on a plastic chair: a change, a lesson, a testimony with a shape. Fruit is what grew on a woman who kept turning up while feeling nothing at all, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that faithfulness, and there was nobody there to write it down.

And I am not going to tell you the bones in your valley are about to rattle. I do not know. What can be said, and only this, is that the question was answered by a prophet with Lord, you know, and that answer was accepted.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the drive you already make, tell Him one true thing about the dry part with no report attached to it. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that, and it does not have to produce anything.