“Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD”

— Ezekiel 37:4

Part of me wonders what Ezekiel did not say in this passage. I wonder what he was thinking at the beginning of the vision. There he was, communing with God, or sitting in prayer, or however it was that he prepared himself to hear from the Lord, and suddenly he was lifted up and carried out to a valley littered with dry, bleached bones.

In Ezekiel’s time, the dead were often laid in a tomb or cave for a season. After the body had returned to dust, the bones would be left in the sun to be cleaned and bleached before being gathered and placed in an ossuary. So what does it mean that Ezekiel is taken to a valley of bones, scattered across the ground? In my sacred imagination, I see them strewn here and there, with no order, no care, no way for a family to come back and gather only the bones of their beloved dead. How could anyone tell which bone belonged to which person when they were scattered so completely? And that makes me wonder: is no one planning to return for them? Does no one care? Is there no one left to carry out this final act of love and tenderness?

These are forgotten bones of forgotten people. There is no life left in them at all. They have been picked clean by carrion birds and weathered by time, left in the sun until they are brittle, dry, and crumbling.

How foolish Ezekiel must have felt, speaking to those bones. What could possibly be the point? Why waste breath on what was so obviously dead?

I remember one year when I was serving two small rural churches. It was hot and dry. My congregations depended largely on ranching, especially cattle. And it did not rain. In the winter, when the rains should have come, they did not. In the spring, we missed the usual thunderstorms. By summer, it was brutally hot and relentlessly dry. The Colorado River stopped running where we were.

I spent hours with my people as they agonized over impossible decisions: whether to sell off cattle, whether to keep only their breeding stock, whether to try to move their herds north to greener pasture. And we prayed for rain. We prayed for wisdom. We prayed for hope. We prayed for anything to happen. And truthfully, there were moments when it felt as though my prayers were rebounding off the sanctuary ceiling. Why bother? What good could we possibly do in the face of such overwhelming evidence, and in the face of a climate crisis we ourselves had helped create?

I felt foolish—like someone speaking to a pile of dry bones.

But then comes the word of the Lord: “I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”

And somehow, by grace, the river still runs. The cattle are still mooing and chewing and feeding us. The ranchers are still ranching. Even in the valley of hopelessness, God is not finished.

Beloved, when our work feels futile, when the needs before us seem too great, when hope feels as dry as scattered bones in the sun, we hold fast to the word of the Lord. God’s breath still moves—in us, around us, and sometimes even despite us. And where God breathes, life is still possible.