Dead of Winter Brings Life

One of the amazing things about nature is how God has given the ability to recreate itself.  I’m counting on this when I look down-deep beneath the snow and know there is life in the cold earth just waiting to spring forth.

It’s easy to feel as gray as the day when dark creeps in too early and steals the light, isn’t it?  You don’t have to live in our part of Pennsylvania to be feeling the winter blahs. Geography has no boundary this year.  Most days I need a shovel, salt, and scraper to get out the door and slide to work.

We can feel as weighed down as dry-bone brittle branches if we don’t know how to see the blooms and fruit that are sure to appear.  But the good news is, each morning when we’re searching for sunlight, we can believe God’s mercies are pouring through the cracks of dawn.

Every dawn.  Every season.

So, right about now you may be feeling a little snowbound – or just plain bound by dead circumstances. You feel your hope is hibernating along with all that is beautiful.  Maybe the life has gone out of your marriage, your health, you’re in a dead-end job, or you feel like your lifeless church needs a little CPR. . . .

. . . or maybe you can fill in the dead blank ___________.

God is a master at bringing life back into things that have expired.

The 37^th chapter of Ezekiel (my awesome favorite) paints a great picture of the re-Creator’s ability to restore hope in hopeless situations.  Ezekiel is looking at a valley of dry bones with a January-eye, but God covers them with fresh flesh and sinew and he sees the army!

The God of heaven has given us the power to revive our dead selves and speak life into our dead zones.  We only need to believe and breathe out the Word that says we can.

If we can be patient with the process that turns a season of snowdrifts into blossoms, we can rest in the beauty that faithfully follows.

Where there is life, there is hope.

Try speaking an Ezekiel prayer over the dead of winter places in your life and my hope is you will experience the vision and scent of spring.

My people, you will know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and cause you to come up from them,  And I will put My Spirit inside you in your own land.  And you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken and done it.  Ezekiel 37:13