Valley of Dry Bones

 If you had ten minutes to talk with any one person in the Bible, whom would you talk to?

Would you talk theology with Paul? Ask Jesus to explain why it has to hurt so much? Maybe you'd ask Joshua what it was like to see the walls of Jericho fall, or Moses how he felt to see Pharaoh's army drown and know that Israel was really and finally free.

Go ahead and ask David to talk about courage, or ask Daniel about lions. I want to hear what they tell you. As for me, I want to talk to one of those nameless multitudes in Ezekiel's valley.

"What was it like?" I want to ask. "How did you end up in the valley? Did someone lead you there, or was it just an accident? Were all those other people with you, or did you think you were going there by yourself?"

And what was it like in the valley? It seems like such a desolate place by the time Ezekiel found it, but what did it look like when you arrived? Did you stay because it seemed beautiful, or was it so barren that you just gave up?

It must have been a dreadful experience being dead in a place like that. All around you are neighbors with stories like your own, but it's impossible to share them because birds have eaten the tongue you once used to tell them, and you've lost the ears that would have understood anything that was spoken.

So you just lay there in the valley, as the the sun slowly rises in the east, inches his way across the sky, and then goes to sleep at night. Years pass that way until all your flesh has blown away; your bones are bleached and white, picked clean by worms; and you lie there forgotten even to yourself, no name, no story, not even a clear claim to which bones are yours and which belong to your neighbor.

Until one day that man appeared in the valley, and impossible things happened. The valley shook, the rattling of bones echoed from the hills, and the legions of the dead remembered who they were. Shins to femurs. Femurs to hips. Vertebra to vertebra. All across the ground, dust swirled, organs grew, sinews knitted themselves once more to frames, skin stretched itself over bodies, and the bodies stood and to a one, they all remembered how to breathe.

Tell me about that moment. Everything else I want to know pales in comparison.