Unboxing the gigantic bones made me giggle. 

My mom says I’m weird and really no one disagrees with her. One tiny part might be because I have a thing for skeletons and skulls. Though I have always thought it a rather harmless affection, it has somehow relegated me to being designated a Halloween lover. The truth is it is just the only time of year I can display said skeletons without being considered really weird.

I guess I blend in more if I stick with the fall decorating schedule.

Though it was only August, there was now a 10-foot skeleton standing on my back patio and I am perfectly happy to keep him there year round, out of sight for the casual passerby.

But rest assured, when September 1 arrives each year, he will make his way to the front yard. 

My neighbors will love me even more than they do now. (Insert toothy grin emoji here.)

Over and again I have tried to put a rational reason around my natural affection for the bony representations. Though I appreciate a good scary Poe story or a Ray Bradbury tale, it isn’t due to fear. Instead it seems an odd, internal longing. I have tried to decipher it fully—is it the sense of incompleteness, the lack of covering that is common to the human condition, I wonder.

For a while in the ‘70s and ‘80s there were these popular bracelets with the letters PBPGINFWMY. It stood for “please be patient God is not finished with me yet.” 

Maybe my bony friends can relate. I know that I do. 

The work is not yet done. We are still incomplete.

During worship, we sang a song called “Rattle” and as we sang, I found myself fighting back an uncontrollable flood of tears. Not sad tears, but the kind that take me to childhood, seeing my mother tear up on occasion during worship. I never knew how to handle it. I wanted her to not be sad and help her. Now I fully understand she didn’t need my help. She was in no way sad. 

Regardless, I tried to stave off the waterworks Sunday morning as we sang:

This is the sound of dry bones rattling

This is the praise, make a dead man walk again

Open the grave, I’m coming out

I’m gonna live, gonna live again

This is the sound of dry bones rattling, yeah

I can hardly type the words without feeling my eyes fighting me again.

Half smiling through tears, I look at the bones in my backyard, the skull on my desk. 

Golgotha, or the place of the skull, where our Savior was crucified—it was but the beginning of the end of death.

Death is a part of all of our lives and when I look at these bones I am reminded again of how I want to live today. Memento mori becomes an aching cry: remember your death and live in light of that. 

When I was assembling the massive figure now towering over my roofline, I struggled. The directions were simple and the pieces were not overwhelming, but they didn’t seem to fit just right. They required some finessing that only my husband could provide. Like the bones with no muscle or proper joints, I needed strength well beyond my own to make them go together. 

This is all of us. 

We are dry, desperate, dead without God. 

We are bare and barren and nothing apart from the creation, covering and breath of God. We are dry bones stuck awkwardly together with the angles not quite matching up. There is no life without his command to come alive.

There is no purpose without his sinews, flesh and skin enveloping our frames.

There is no dead man walking around unless he has been resurrected by the King of creation. Perhaps what I feel is empathy when I look longingly at those skeletal outlines. 

We are desperate for the Redeemer to give us life.

My bony friends in the yard, it is as if they are waiting expectantly, wholly reliant on life outside of themselves. Lazarus in his four-day decay, Jairus’ daughter only hours beyond life, the widow’s son being carried out of the city in funeral procession, bones in a grave, all had this in common. They were awaiting the command of Jesus to bring them back to life. 

The Author of life walked out of his own grave and now He is calling us out of ours.

Ezekiel 37:3-6

“And he said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these