40 Days with the Holy Spirit: Fresh Air for Every Day

READ Ezekiel 37:1–10

GOD grabbed me. GOD’s Spirit [ruach]11 took me up and set me down in the middle of an open plain strewn with bones. He led me around and among them—a lot of bones! There were bones all over the plain—dry bones, bleached by the sun.

He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

I said, “Master GOD, only you know that.”

He said to me, “Prophesy over these bones: ‘Dry bones, listen to the Message of GOD!’

“GOD, the Master, told the dry bones, “Watch this: I’m bringing the breath [ruach] of life to you and you’ll come to life. I’ll attach sinews to you, put meat on your bones, cover you with skin, and breathe life into you. You’ll come alive and you’ll realize that I am GOD!”

I prophesied just as I’d been commanded. As I prophesied, there was a sound and, oh, rustling! The bones moved and came together, bone to bone. I kept watching. Sinews formed, then muscles on the bones, then skin stretched over them. But they had no breath [ruach] in them.

He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath [ruach]. Prophesy, son of man. Tell the breath [ruach], ‘GOD, the Master, says, Come from the four winds [ruach]. Come, breath [ruach]. Breathe on these slain bodies. Breathe life!’”

So I prophesied, just as he commanded me. The breath entered them and they came alive! They stood up on their feet, a huge army. (THE MESSAGE)

MEDITATE

A few years ago, a friend whose husband had died talked about her delayed reaction to his death. She’d had to take care of her children—now more so than ever—so she didn’t have time to grieve. Then, about a year later, her dog ran in front of a car and was killed. She and her husband had taken that dog to agility classes, where it had bounced and lurched in sheer pleasure. When she found out the dog had died, my friend stopped. Finally. Not just chores and parenting and work. She stopped breathing. She couldn’t breathe—the grief was so heavy on her.

People will sometimes say that grief feels like an elephant stomping on your chest. You can’t breathe. You can’t even gasp for air. There isn’t an ounce of ruach left to give life. There’s only grief.

An elephant had stomped, in our passage today, on Israel’s chest. That elephant was Babylon, a cold-blooded empire that destroyed Jerusalem, pillaged its temple, violated its land, and exiled its leaders. Babylon left Israel with only shards of hope, with dreams in tatters. Ezekiel, an idiosyncratic but brilliant prophet, knew what this nation had become: a valley filled with very many, very dry bones. He knew this because the Spirit-wind of God had thrown Ezekiel smack into the middle of the pile, where he climbed on and clawed these bones, where he peered beyond the cusp of death at a world with bones clattering, fresh sinews laid on top like a linen tablecloth, flesh draped over the sinews, skin wrapping the flesh.

At the heart of this clattering and clothing and coating is ruach, God’s Spirit-breath. God is about to breathe new life into Israel. But not quite yet. The process of renewal, revitalization, is protracted rather than instantaneous, prolonged rather than immediate, a stunning sequence of life-giving. A promise of the Spirit is followed by

• a promise of sinews and flesh and skin and Spirit-breath is followed by

• bones clattering and coming together are followed by

• bodies restored with sinews and flesh are followed by

• no life, not yet anyway, which is followed finally by

• inbreathing, the rush of Spirit-breath-wind from the four corners of the earth into very many, very dry bones bleached in the desert sun.

Whew! How difficult the process of regeneration can be. How difficult it is to get the elephant off a broken people’s chest. How difficult it is to learn to breathe again.

A friend of mine who once worked for an international aid agency told me how workers deal with starving children. At the acute stages of starvation, the body shuts down. It is numb, no longer ravenous, barely hungry. Aid workers respond by placing sugar water on the lips of starving children. Eventually, the fortunate ones begin again to feel hunger. When they do, they hurt intensely, their bodies wracked with pain. They scream, bellow, and wail, as their small bodies begin again to beg for water and bread. They are resurrected, but the midwife of new life is overwhelming pain.

The same is true of each of us, spiritually. We adopt compromised values that numb us to real life. We accept practices that inoculate us from real faith. We absorb distractions that derail us from pure spirituality. We become, in a paraphrase of a Greek word the apostle Paul adopted, sarkikos: “merely human.” Our longings shut down. We stop hungering and yearning for God altogether. We need resurrection.

For some of us on this path, there may be a dramatic rush of the Spirit, a sensational conversion, which brings us back to life. For others of us who don’t just lack hope but reject it and give up on the promise of new life, repairs may be necessary before the Spirit rushes to fill us with bone-clattering, despair-shattering new life. Learning to breathe again won’t be easy.

For lifeless communities, too, which have slipped into the throes of death, the process of rejuvenation may take a long time. Bones need to be reattached, sinews re-laid, flesh restored before the Spirit-breath of God rushes to renew. There is hard work to do, relationships to be restored, sleeves to be rolled up in these communities long before the Spirit pulses with new life.

Sometimes, life arrives step by step. New life comes in stages. As the prophet puts it, only at the end of the process, after bones have rattled, sinews covered the bones, skin shielded the sinews, and the Spirit-winds rustled themselves into a storm of life. Only after all of this could it be said that the Spirit entered them and they came alive! They stood up on their feet, a huge army.

REFLECT