In my home, there’s a tiny room where dreams come to life. The walls are lined with shelves, and books tower from floor to ceiling. Everywhere your eye settles is another story breathed onto the page through the imagination of the authors. It is a room for dreaming, for surrounding myself with what could be–a room where stories unfold and imagined worlds become real and the heroine sets off on an epic journey.
On the wall hangs a world map filled with tiny, colorful magnetic pins. My husband painstakingly matched each pin to the cities we’ve visited during the years we lived abroad. It serves as a reminder of the extraordinary times we’ve spent in foreign lands. The map is a portal, a door into our past, and hopefully our future.
I sit beneath the map when I write, and it hovers like a crown above me. Across the room hangs a painting of a Swiss barn set in the valley of the Alps. I drove past that same barn every day as I shuttled my children to school. The view is imprinted on my mind’s eye like a permanent tattoo.
It was a long ago dream, come to life, and now it is a memory that reminds me of what could be, what is possible when we remain open to change and serendipity.
Scattered between the book shelves and stuffed under my writing chair, are dreams of another kind. All of my old book proposals (and there are many), sit in the same tiny room where the books live, as if by osmosis they might become full-grown books themselves.
When I worked on my last proposal, (a long outline, marketing plan, and the first three chapters of my book) I used to burn a candle called Bourbon Maple as I wrote. Every time I saw a bourbon maple candle in the store, I’d bring it home, imagining myself lighting the wick every morning as I completed chapter after chapter. The flicker and sweet scent served as a sign of hope to me.
As most of you know, that book never made it past the proposal stage, and it’s now joined the others in the crevice between the bookshelf and the wall. When I realized there was no more life in it, I packed away all of the bourbon maple candles too because the scent now reminds me of miscarried hope.
Deferred dreams often feel like a valley of dry bones. Where once there was muscle and tendon and flesh, there is nothing left to create movement. There is no breath of life filling nostrils or inflating lungs. Instead, there are marrow-dried bones littering a deep valley. It’s hard to believe they could breathe again.
As Easter approaches, my thoughts circle around and around resurrection–the raising of the dead. Lazarus comes to mind, and Jairus’ daughter, and of course, Jesus–the supreme example of death born again. But, I’m also drawn to Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezek 37). He is told to prophecy life into the bones, to speak the word of God into them, and what followed was breath and enfleshment and movement: an army filled with life.
As I’ve fasted and prayed this Lent, it’s become clear to me that I am in a valley of dry bones season for a number of reasons. As the weeks have progressed, I’ve seen stirrings, a flicker of life here, a hint of breath there. Like Ezekiel, I have spoken the word of God into some of my deepest desires and these small dream-deaths , and slowly my hope is being renewed.
I lit my bourbon maple candle today. Not because I believe it will magically bring my book to life, but because it is a symbol of hope to me. I want it to rise like incense before the Lord, a reminder that I am still working, praying, prophesying to the desires I believe he’s placed in me.
Perhaps you find yourself in a similar place today, desperate for hope and the breath of life only God can give. Perhaps you have a dream deferred, a difficult relationship, a compromised body. I have lit a single candle for all of us, a flickering symbol that we believe in the resurrection of all things, whether in this life or the next. Let Ezekiel’s words be our prayer today.
“Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” ~Ezek.37:9
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