When I moved into my new home, to beautify my front yard, my dad planted 3 pine trees, in addition to some shrubs that grew lower. My job was to plant the pretty flowers and water them. As I was completely new to gardening of any kind, I did the best I knew how and watered my plants, but somehow the pine trees still died.
Because they had been planted deep in the ground, I was not strong enough to pull them out myself, and so I just left them. In between the vibrant pink, purple and orange flowers that I planted annually, were the dead pine trees. For some reason, I’d gotten accustomed to seeing them and they didn’t bother me as much – life and death in the same garden.
I’d long told my father about my dead pine trees (close to a year) but he hadn’t had time to do anything about them, until today. He told me weeks ago that he had new flowers for me. As I knew that I hadn’t been strong enough to pull out the pine trees in the first place, I knew it would be his job. He called me and told me he needed to be in my neck of the woods and he would bring my plants and I didn’t even need to be home.
When I got home later in the night, and I knew he had been by, one of the first things I did was rush to the front yard to see what he’d done. When I saw it, I was gushing at what my father could do. He had pulled up the dead pine trees. He planted more pine trees and other trees than had been there before. When I looked at it, my pretty purple, pink and orange flowers, now had a vibrant backdrop of living shrubs.
What situation are you waiting for your Heavenly Father to bring life to? You’ve told Him of your need, but He’s told you the time wasn’t quite right yet. He knows your need. He knows you aren’t strong enough to bring your own situation back to life.
In Ezekiel 37, God asks Ezekiel if the dry bones could live. I love Ezekiel’s response, ‘Lord, only you alone know’. God knows all about your dry bones situation and He alone can bring it to life and add flesh, tendons and breath back into the situation, but you must trust Him and keep having faith. He’s the only one who can turn your situation around in just the right moment.
Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for earthly fathers who can teach us. We thank you that you know all about situations that seem dead, and might even be dead, but just as you did in the valley of dry bones, you can bring back an army alive, you can bring back what we think might be dead in our own life. Help us to trust you with all our hearts and lean not unto our own understanding of what we see or what we perceive.