So you’ve come to a fork in the road. One path leads to more of the same. The other leads to resistance. One path appears easy. The other looks treacherous and daunting. Your left with this impossible decision. Knowing where you want to go, where you need to go, but do you have the strength? What if you get a little ways down the road and collapse? Who will help you then?
Satan tells you…no one. No one will help you on this path. It’s stupid and ugly. Filled with porous holes of noxious fumes. Surely anyone you invite along will be overwhelmed by the stench of your depravity. You just thought you were jacked up before. What will they think of you now?
So you look longingly down the painful path…knowing there is beauty from ashes at the end – but it seems too far – and what if you get swallowed up and stuck?
Again a sneaky voice says…don’t do it. Keep going the direction you’re going. You are doing fine. The blessing over there exists – but you will never make it. Play it safe. It’s not that bad over here.
But the dry icky bones on the unsafe path have a magnetism about them. Something whispers…dry bones come alive…
“The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”
As stealthy as Satan can be with his wooing of “normalcy” and ease – his water is stagnant. There is no life. Just more of the same you can’t do this, who do you think you are, and you’ll never be enough.
And so instead of seeing the dry bones for what they are, you choose to see them for what they could be. You decide it’s best to dance with the one who brung ya this far…knowing what God can do with a few tendons and life giving breath.
And you move.
With a great deal of uncertainty – yes…but you move.
And you praise. Not only for what is but for what is to come.