One hour. I'll take a one hour nap.
Something awoke inside of me.
The last 10 days have been all sorts of awful. The girl I've been mooning over for the past six months—despite knowing full well that I was firmly ensconced in the Friend Zone™ and didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell—finally cut me loose and told me she was seeing someone else. A patient I had seen a couple of times in the office suddenly collapsed on the street, went into asystole, didn't get revived until she was in the ER, and is now completely gorked and on a ventilator, with the family wanting to do everything. And I was on-call all weekend, fielding all sorts of bizarre and tiring calls—from some guy who was freaking out about his systolic being in the 150s without any other symptoms, to a lady who fell of a ladder and ended up having a rib fracture. And I even admitted another patient. By the time Monday rolled around again, I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.
In the direst of straits, there are a couple of things that always manage to lift my spirits at least a little. One is thinking about what I was like as a little kid. Sometimes me and my parents wonder what happened to that kid, who was fearless, who could talk the ear off of anyone, and who was always the center of attention. What a weird contrast to what I'm like now: anxious and fearful, quiet and unassuming, always skulking in the shadows. What did happen? It's like I'm a changeling or something.
The other thing is the story of the Valley of Dry Bones:
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath* to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.’
So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’ I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.’
—Ezekiel 37:1-14
And what strikes me most about this passage is that God didn't just resurrected the dead with his own power. He gave Ezekiel the power to do this. And it reminds me of something a Jesuit priest told me: what if the reason Jesus became human was not to demonstrate the power of being God, but to demonstrate the power of being human? That by becoming human, he showed us that we, too, could perform miracles.
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