The nurse kept up a light-hearted chatter as she checked my pulse and blood pressure in the doctor’s office. I stared at the floor, eyes red-rimmed and puffy, answering only when needed.
Earlier that day I’d been at work when an intense pain shot through my abdomen. I was in the first round of a new infertility treatment, and I was late that month. When I could collect myself enough to get to the bathroom, I found blood. So. Much. Blood.
My first and only frantic thought as I made my way from that bathroom to the doctor’s office was miscarriage.
They examined me and ran some tests. I shivered in that cold room, wearing their thin robe under a paper blanket, for what felt like an eternity. The despair was suffocating.
Eventually the nurse came back with a big smile on her face. “Good news—it’s not a miscarriage!” she exclaimed. “In fact, all tests show that there’s not even the slightest chance you’ve ever been pregnant!”
And so she looked utterly confused when I started sobbing.
I knew she was trying to be kind. But all I could hear was, “Congratulations! You’re barren!”
*
So many people I know are in pain—grief, depression, illness, heartache, anxiety, shame—floundering, wondering what sort of hope exists for them if the whole world is falling apart. Every day I see people leaving social media, saying they’re tired of the negativity and fear. I get half-kidding messages from friends wondering if we need to start stockpiling rations and turning money into gold.
When I look around, I feel it too—the suffocating grip of despair. The urge to stop trying. To just get out of the way and let what will happen, happen.
I see fear and anger and deception and hatred and self-righteousness flourishing. It seems everywhere you look, darkness is taking over. Like storm clouds at noon. And the thicker they get, the less hope people have.
And I see an army of Light bearers confronted with real giants for the first time. And they are terrified, laying down, wasting away as the giants taunt and ridicule and fear-monger.
*
500 years after David defied Goliath, the nation of Israel is in exile in Babylon. It’s during this time that a prophet had a vision of a dusty, barren valley full of dusty, decaying bones. The Lord told the prophet to speak to them—to speak life over them. As he does, the prophet sees the bones begin to move; he hears the rattling as they shift and bind back together with muscles and sinews and skin.
Then the Lord commands him to speak breath into them. The Hebrew word for “breath” in this verse is ruach. It can mean, simply, breath. But it is also used for wind and spirit. It was the ruach of God that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1. Moses said it was the ruach of God that caused the Red Sea to split and then to close again. The psalmist says it’s the ruach of God that whispered the sea of stars into existence.
The Greek equivalent in the New Testament is pneuma. It’s pneuma that comes upon Mary and conceives Jesus. It’s pneuma that Jesus speaks of when talking with Nicodemus. Paul says we have not received the spirit of the world, but the pneuma who is from God. We see the fruit of the pneuma in Galatians and we are told we can wield the sword of the pneuma in Ephesians.
It’s this powerful, life-giving breath that the prophet speaks into the dry bones. And they’re no longer just bones; they are pink-cheeked, vital, fully alive humans. And you know what the first thing these fully restored, resurrected people say? “Our bones are dry. All hope is gone. Our nation is lost.”
*
I think we get so overwhelmed at the enormity of the valley before us that we lose our perspective. All we see are the walls closing us in, the endless blackness, the depths of death ahead on the path.
Our own pain and hopelessness are echoed back to us and amplified as we see the pain of our family and friends, our state, our country. Our world. We see lawlessness and evil prospering. We’re in Babylon, splintered and divided. We want to see the Messiah come thundering on the clouds, galloping in with sword glinting, slashing away at injustice, overthrowing wickedness.
Instead, He sends a breath. A wind. A Spirit. To infuse our dry bones with Life. To knit us back together with vitality and power.
Yet all we see are the bones. Death. Futility. And so we use His precious Breath in us to complain that all is lost.
And He meets our fear with Love. Our hopelessness with Hope. He gently confronts our despair, saying, “I will breathe My Spirit into you, and you will be alive once again. I’m making a way through the desert—and I’m making you an army of light for the nations. You’ll illume them until my salvation reaches to the ends of the earth.”
*
It’s been almost a decade since I sobbed in that exam room. For years after that, I walked through a valley where the shadow of death covered my womb. I hoped; I despaired. I prayed with passion; I wondered what good my prayers even did. I stood strong with promise and lay low after a big blow.
What I couldn’t see in that dark, dusty valley was that God was healing me. He sent friends and family to speak life over me—He was knitting me back together with vitality and power. And then, in His amazing timing, He breathed His ruach, His pneuma, into my body.
He brought forth life from an empty, barren place.
As I write, my husband is chasing our two miracle boys around our house. I can hear his deep laugh mingling with their delighted squeals as he tosses them onto the bed. And I know what Light sounds like.
*
Today my three-year-old and I took our dogs for a walk down our country road. It was the first time he and I have gone alone, each holding a leash. It was an ordinary, unremarkable venture, and yet it was so full of Promise for me. Our breath mingled with dust and sunlight, and it felt like Hope.
And I think that is how we overcome the darkness. How we confront and slay the giants of despair and hopelessness. Not in grand, sweeping gestures, but in the simple, ordinary, everyday moments. Like David and his stones, we use what we have to fight.
Can you sing? Cook? Can you bake, sew, craft, build? Listen? Can you teach, serve, write, design? Give? Can you offer a cup of cold water or safe place to land? Can you be present to another’s pain without trying to fix them?
We use the gifts and talents and resources we have to breathe Life—His ruach—into the dry bones of one person. And as we see them come alive, we do it to another, and then we help them do it. And we keep on breathing, one breath at a time, until the weapons of this world are rendered useless and the giants fall.
Until our whispered breaths reverberate and crescendo into the sound of Light that shakes the dust off the valley walls and echoes Hope across the land.
Until Life springs forth from what we thought was barren.
Because we are not dry bones.
We are an army of Living Light.
***
