When the Bones Began to Move

Planted by Lynda Turnbull - Australia

Before the book Where Bones Wait began, I was quite literally sitting in a place asking the Father,

What on earth am I doing here?

I was not in a good place—mentally, physically or emotionally—and I really was asking the Father, with rather less grace than I might like to admit,

“What on earth am I doing here and why have you brought me to this place?”

To add to the discomfort of everything I was experiencing the months ahead seemed to stretch before me like a great void of nothingness.

I wasn’t particularly happy about that either.

I have always been someone with a project, a purpose or a goal somewhere on the horizon. But this time there was nothing I could see. No next thing. No plan. Just what felt like an enormous empty space.

I certainly wasn’t thinking about writing a book.

I had written my first book when I was twelve — teenage trash, I might add — and another book many years later. But somewhere along the way I had almost forgotten how much I loved to write. Writing had always been one of my happy places, yet even that seemed to have quietly disappeared from view.

And then, sitting in what felt to me like the most desolate, forgotten place imaginable, asking the Father what on earth I was doing there, something happened.

Within a few moments, He opened Ezekiel 37 to me in a way I had never seen before.

I didn’t know then that it would become a book.

Several months later, during what could generously be described as a woe-is-me moment with two friends, I shared some of what had been unfolding for me. They both said, almost simultaneously,

“You need to start writing your book.”

And so that day - I did. I started.

What the Father had shown me in moments took months to unpack into words. But somewhere in the writing, I began to realise something rather extraordinary.

I wasn’t simply writing about Ezekiel 37.

I was living it.

The dry bones of my own love of writing — even of writing books — were coming to life before my eyes.

Things I had forgotten about were being breathed upon again.

And chapter after chapter, I found myself having to walk through the very things I was writing.

I began to see that time and what looks like death do not necessarily have the final say.

I was seeing that the Logos remains alive and active even when nothing appears to be happening

and

that resurrection may not be the end of the story, but just the beginning of something taking form.

I could suddenly see that something we thought had died may in fact, be waiting for Life to reveal it in a form we hadn’t anticipated.

I also began learning something about time.

For much of my life I had been accustomed to the rhythm of urgency — always moving towards the next thing, responding to what needed to be done, living at a pace that often kept my nervous system activated.

But Life has its own rhythm.

That rhythm was rest and peace and there is a gentle flow to it.

There really is a time for everything under heaven.

Perhaps one of the deepest things I have come to know through this journey is that the Father does not forget what He has spoken, even when we do.

He is so, so, so faithful.

The Logos does not lose its Life because time has passed or because we can no longer see evidence of what was spoken. What He has sent forth will accomplish what it was sent to do — although its fulfillment may not look the way we imagined or arrive within the time frame we expected.

Sometimes we have to leave room for His surprises.

Looking back now, I can see that the bones really did begin to move.

My love of writing has somewhere to live again. Another book is already beginning its own journey. And perhaps even more significantly, my relationship with time has changed.

None of this happened because I managed to resurrect something.

Breath came.

And Life began to move.

I don’t know how another person’s story will unfold. I don’t know what resurrection will look like for someone else’s forgotten dream, desire or vision.

But I have come to trust the One who does.

Perhaps our invitation is not to determine how something must happen, or when, but to loosen our grip on the form we thought it had to take.

A seed can carry Life long before anything appears above the soil.

The Logos within what the Father has spoken has not forgotten its purpose.

And sometimes, when we least expect it, Breath meets that hidden Life…

and the bones begin to move.