[2]
Ezekiel 37:5
Good
News Translation
5 Tell them that I, the
Sovereign Lord, am saying to them: I am going to put breath into you and
bring you back to life.
The first few thoughts that flowed through my waking brain this
morning were the words of the last verse of Amazing Grace. As I remember it, it
goes--
When we’ve been there ten thousand
years
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Than when we first begun.
I have always been intrigued by languages. I listened to a
series of 34 lectures by a Great Courses professor entitled Language Families
of the World. He described the various classes of some 7,000 languages spoken
in the world today and their unbelievably different ways of expressing ordinary
thoughts. I’ve dabbled in over 10 of them. I would love to spend time exploring
them all. The words of my thesis advisor came to mind, “I only have one life to
live!”
As I tackled graduate mathematics, I found myself at the
bottom of a vast quantity of knowledge surrounding me in every direction. I
recognized that I had to forge my way through this in one direction until I
reached its fringe. Then I pushed outwards and added a new bubble to it. What
this did was open an even more vast array of unknowns to explore. I then had
even more questions I wished to answer. The more we know, the more we realize
how much more there is to discover. My curiosity is endless.
As a child I longed to have an electric train. We were much
too poor to even consider buying one. I discovered a little shop in Bulawayo
that had a delightful array of electric trains. I could stand there for hours
and imagine what I could do with them. On one of our trips, Sylvia and I
discovered a farm in southern Wisconsin where a farmer had a whole barn filled
with trains and tracks. His wife showed us around, ran a bunch of the trains
for us. When she left, she turned the power off, and all the trains stopped and
sat there, dead, until she would provide them power again.
Life is like that barn of trains. The huge array of life thrives
around the world. All of it depends on external power. When that “power” is cut
off, life ceases. Everything lies there in obvious readiness to spring into
action. Life is like that barn, and in some ways, God is like that woman in the
barn. As long as God provides that elusive spark of life, it roars on; otherwise,
nothing—desolation. We need the Sovereign Lord to put breath back into the dead
bones.
Lord, thank You for Your constant supply of breath and
life and the glorious promise it holds for our future.
No comments:
Post a Comment