Still Breathing

The carnage of a life well-intended lies around me. Dead hopes. Dead relationships. Dead dreams. It looks like a wasteland as far as I can see. I am battle weary, tired of trying to defend what is already gone. Why fight on for what isn't...what won't be? Time to accept the loss. Time to let the dead rest in peace...to let me rest in peace...

My swagger is gone. My heart and spirit sag. I am ready to call time of death on these carcasses, but before the words tumble from my tongue, my comrade in arms slaps her hand over my mouth and says, "NO! I still see it breathing...I still see God breathing into it."

She is not looking at the bones littering the landscape. She is looking at me. She sees God still breathing into ME.

The dry bones in the desert are not the issue. How they look is not the issue. It isn’t how old or breathless they are. They are just bones, lifeless bones. Their condition doesn’t matter. It is the breath in the one speaking that matters. The willingness to be breathed into so breath can go forth is what matters.
God still has something for me to breath into. It may not be what I used to breath into, but He always puts in breath so I can breath it into something else.

The question is not the lifelessness of the bones but whether I am still breathing?