This is from an old journal of mine. Been mulling over these thoughts these days:
Living out of a backpack for this part of my life is something I never thought I’d like. It’s one of those things I thought I’d like to do as a teenager. Yanno, get a backpack, go out on the open road, dye my hair blue, listen to Jimi Hendrix, but I won’t come back smelling like garbage and weed because I’M SMARTER THAN THAT. (Author’s note: the caps denote sarcasm in this sentence)
Now that I’m on that road, I found that following Jesus requires much more than I dreamed.
I listened to my favorite poem today, Sunni Patterson’s “We Made It”, in which she ends with “…But death don’t come in vain. Not for us to remain enslaved or our spirits to remain in cages. It comes that we might be courageous. To fulfill our obligation to our God and all creation and stand in determination able to look Death in the face and say ‘we made it. we made it. we made it. we made it’.
The prophet Ezekiel was told to prophecy to dead bones and bring them to life with the power of God. I wonder how long he stood there, staring at the bones before he said anything. I wonder if he looked at it and thought God was crazy. I wonder if he felt angry at first for God leading him back to seeing his people being slaughtered. And then God says, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
Ezekiel responses with the safe theological answer, “Sovereign Lord, <gulp> You alone know.”
4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath[a] enter you, and you will come to life. 6 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.”
God help me to speak life to the dead parts of my life. When I am scared, let me not run but run to you and say, “Can these skeletons in my closet live? Sovereign Lord, you alone know”.
I imagine God saying, “Chase, can your dead dreams live? Have you become so burned out and protectively cynical that you have forgotten that I can make your dead dreams live?”
And I look back at my failures and fears, and it takes all that is within me, trembling in fear, “Sovereign Lord… You alone know…”
So, here I go saying to my dead dreams, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: “I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. And you will know that Jesus is Lord.”
Pray for me that I never lose sight in failures that God can make dead bones walk. I pray that you don’t just see the bones, but see that spirit that can make them walk.
