hope.

Well, I was thinking that my next post would be the one I recently plugged, the one I'm working on. However, I'm trying to find words that aren't so convoluted.

Instead, I offer something different tonight. It's a prayer I wrote this spring, during a time when I deeply felt the tension between 'reality' and hope. It's not polished, but it's honest:


When Ezekiel stood in the middle of the valley with skeletons strewn everywhere,
hot and dry,
you asked him, "Son of man, can they live?"

Can they live?

If anyone else had asked, he would have scoffed, or laughed,
or wept.

But you questioned him, and his certainty dissolved.

"Only you know, sovereign Lord," he said,
wondering if even that was a safe reply.


Now Ezekiel's words are mine.
They're on my lips,
though it wasn't me you asked.

But I'm standing in the valley, and these bones are brittle and bleached.

Will the dead ever rise -- will I see them live?
You've opened graves before, but what of these?

Can they live?


Ezekiel prophesied to the bones; you told him to.
Will I say anything at all?