The Breath in the Valley

Ezekiel is a priest in exile. He writes to people who have lost everything that told them who they were: the city, the temple, the land, the king. By chapter 37 they have a phrase they keep saying to themselves – you can hear it in verse 11: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished; we are cut off.” That is not poetry. That is a nation deciding it is dead.

So God takes the prophet by the hand – the text says “the hand of the LORD was upon me” – and sets him down in the middle of a valley. Not at the edge, where he could keep his distance. In the middle, surrounded. And the valley is full of bones. Ezekiel walks among them, all around, and notices two things he is careful to record: there are a great many, and they are very dry. This is not a fresh battlefield. This is old death, bleached and scattered, long past any hope of a pulse.

Then God asks the strangest question in the book: “Son of man, can these bones come to life?” Ezekiel does not say yes, and he does not say no. He says the only honest thing a man standing in a graveyard can say: “O Lord GOD, only You know.” He hands the question back to the One who asked it – which turns out to be exactly the right answer.

A chaplain I trust once sat with a man in a recovery ward who had relapsed for the fourth time. The man would not look up. He kept saying the same sentence, almost under his breath: “I’m done. There’s nothing left in me. I’m done.” Not dramatic. Flat. The voice of someone who has already attended his own funeral and is just waiting for everyone else to agree.

The chaplain told me he had learned not to argue with that sentence. You cannot talk a person out of feeling like dry bones by insisting the bones look fine. They do not look fine. They are very dry, and pretending otherwise only proves you have not really looked.

What he did instead was stay. He sat in the middle of it. And after a long silence he said, “I can’t put life back in you. But I know the One who can, and I’m going to keep asking Him to.” The man didn’t answer. But he came back the next day, and the next – which, the chaplain said, is what breath looks like before you can see it: a flicker of return where there had only been the going.

A priest deported to Babylon with the first wave of exiles around 597 BC, before the temple fell. Cut off from the altar where a priest’s whole life was meant to be spent, Ezekiel became a prophet of strange and vivid visions. God addresses him more than ninety times as ‘son of man’ – a mortal, a creature of dust – and through this dust-man delivers the promise that dust can live again. He prophesied to a people who had pronounced themselves dead, and was shown a valley where the verdict was overturned.