Excerpts from: Can These Bones Live? If you spend anytime on the internet you've seen the various ads for online classifieds, chat rooms and websites like Matchmakers, etc where people with the same interests can advertise, chat and hook up. These people are in search of other people - for companionship, for long term relationships, dinner and a movie or other stuff. On the matchmaker sites, you naturally have to take the descriptions people give of themselves with a grain of salt..maybe a pound of salt. More often than not, the real meaning of "athletic" is "sits on the couch and watches ESPN." And a person who says they are "spiritual" could base this description on the fact that they go to church on Easter and Christmas - with their grandmother. For instance....here is a list of " The Real Meaning behind Personal Want Ad Abbreviations" Ads by Women:
And ad by Men:
These ads are nothing new. They've been around for years in the personals and now in chat rooms. What's new is Craig's List, a web site of free online area classifieds, jobs, real estate, and also chat rooms for like minded people. In these sections, people post messages like "Anyone for a road trip?" ... "Bored at work, let's IM" ... "Up for Kung Pao chicken" ... and even "Looking for Best Friend." Not everyone who places a personal ad is interested in hooking up. There are giga-loads of people out there who are looking primarily for friendship, and they are aching for an end to their loneliness. That's why Craig has his list. Is there no fate worse than being alone? A columnist at The Washington Post tells some stories that suggest this might be true.
The columnist concluded, "To read these queries is to realize how needy people are, even if they express it only under a cloak of Internet anonymity." At any hour of the day or night, you can find people on Craig's List who are anxious to see movies with you, go dancing with you, eat Kung Pao with you, or even take off on a road trip with you. All you have to do is send them an e-mail. In other words, they want to feel alive again. They're a bag of bones and they want to feel like they're living. They want to sense that there is substance and meaning to who they are. They want to feel as though they're not a bag of bones in decaying skin - but that there is significance to the life they live. We can relate to these longings, because there have been times in each of our lives in which we have felt alone and isolated, cut off from friends and hungry for companionship. One day we wake up in what seems like a strange city and wonder to ourselves, "What am I doing here? I feel so cut off, so lifeless, so alone." There's nothing wrong with being needy, and nothing new about it, either. About 600 years before the birth of Christ, the people of God were in exile in Babylon and were for quite some time. They were wasting away and so they posted this message on Zeke's List--- a FREE on-papyrus classified section run by the prophet Ezekiel:
Now you might be wondering just how bad the Israelites had it in Babylon. There isn't much we can learn from a single line of a personal ad. But Ezekiel gives us a vision in today's text that captures the depth of his people's desperation. It's a powerful picture of just how needy they are, and how achingly anxious they are to feel connected to God, to their homeland, and to one another. " The LORD took hold of me," reports Ezekiel, "and I was carried away by the Spirit of the LORD to a valley filled with bones" (37:1). The valley is filled with human remains, the leftovers of a battle in which the fallen soldiers are simply left to decay in place, without even a decent burial. Hope is gone, and the will to act is spent. One scholar describes it as "a multitude of disconnected and thoroughly desiccated bones." Disconnected and desiccated. What a powerful description of lifelessness! We know how that feels, don't we? We've been disconnected from family, from friends, from God ... and are desiccated, dried out, shriveled and shrunken. We know those bones. We've been there. Maybe someone here visited this valley last week. Maybe someone here has taken up residence or is on Zeke's list looking for a new job, a new residence, a new alias. You've lost your passion, hunger and thirst for your first love. Life is a desert crawl all of a sudden and it seems as if you are miles away from home. Have you become disconnected and desiccated in your life? Maybe a better question to ask is how did you get there? A little at a time? An hour here, and hour there. Then hours turn into days, days turn into months, months turn into years. Before you know it your once healthy, full of life Spirit has shriveled away and there is a great distance between you and your God. You are disconnected. What is it that you need the breath of God to breathe into today? What is it that is disconnected, dried out and dead? Maybe a vision, a promise, a hope? Perhaps a relationship, a marriage, a vocation? Your walk with the Lord that once was vibrant and resonating with life, now is shriveled up, hollow and well, dead. Then God says to Ezekiel , "Son of man, can these bones become living people again?" (37:3). The prophet answers, "O Sovereign Lord, you alone know the answer to that." but you can guess what he is thinking ... No way!
Never in Ezekiel's life has he seen a multitude of dry, bleached bones leap off the floor of a sun-baked valley and return to life. The prophet senses that these bones are about as dead as the kingdom of Israel - a kingdom that is now completely disconnected and lying in ruins, while its people feel totally desiccated and dried out in the land of Babylon. As Ezekiel spoke there was a noise -a rattling noise all across the valley. The bones of each body came together and attached themselves as they had been before. "Then as I watched, muscles and flesh formed over the bones. Then skin formed to cover their bodies, but they still had no breath in them" (37:7-8). Then God commands Ezekiel to speak once again, which he does; "This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come, O breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so that they may live again."(37:9)... and the breath comes into them, and they live, and they stand on their feet - a vast multitude. So where do you think these bones found life? Certainly not in the heat and dust of the valley floor, and not in an answer to a personal ad. No, they find their life in the word of the Lord, in the action of a God who can actually revive the dead. We, too, need the breath of God. We need His breath to breathe life back into us.....to animate us.
The message for us, when we are feeling disconnected and desiccated, is to get our names - not on Craig's List, or Zeke's List - but on God's List.
Disconnected and desiccated, we hear God say, "I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live." It's a transformation that takes us from shrunken sinews to spiritual strength and that reconnects us not only to God, but to others - the family of God, brothers and sisters, parents, friends and those in need of our life-touch, and love-touch. It's a metamorphosis that begins with our cry to Him for help. |