Skeleton Cribs

While our toddler has not yet discovered he can climb out of his crib, I know my days are numbered. I recall the morning I finally gave up on keeping our middle child in her crib; I’d found her before sunrise elbow deep in the peanut butter jar in front of the pantry, her muslin sleep sack unzipped, still hanging from her arms, billowing behind her like a cape. In my head she just flew over the side of her crib directly to the snacks. She does have a bit of a salty superhero energy about her, even more so now.

But in the days following this sticky peanut-butter-filled morning, I located our toolbox, plucking the screwdriver from its case, and dismantled her crib, stacking the wooden pieces in our living room, readying myself to drop it off as a hand-me-down at an expectant friend’s house. I stood back, taking in the pile of creamy white spindle crib railings, and burst into tears. I couldn’t help but see a skeleton before me, a pile of babyhood bones. I felt the death of the season, a lifeless frame stacked atop our tile floor — a disassembled body, the kind of thing you don’t expect to put back together. I even took a picture of it. It felt so visceral.

There’s a moment in Ezekiel 37 when God asks the prophet a pointed question: “Son of man, can these bones live?” The valley is littered with dry, scattered remains — past the point of mere resuscitation. It’s the kind of landscape that would garner a response along the lines of, “No, Lord. This is done. Whatever was here is over, is gone.”

And yet, Ezekiel doesn’t answer that way. Instead, he replies: “O Lord God, you alone know.”

I wish I could stand beside that former version of myself as she took in the skeleton of her child’s babyhood, grasp her hand, and gently breathe out the words of Isaiah 43 (this week’s Old Testament reading): “God is about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” I would also describe Ezekiel standing in that valley, watching the bones rattle and reassemble, as sinews stretched and flesh covered them again. But they were lifeless — until God breathed. Until the Spirit moved, and what had been dead stood up, full of life.

God didn’t finish there, either: “I will open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it.” That promise — the graves opening, the Spirit filling, the people being settled –– speaks to more than just a physical reassembly. It’s restoration, a return not just to life, but to home and the places God calls us.

I think about that breath often. The way we might only see skeletons, but God sees a future. He sees and is doing a “nu thang” even amidst death and endings.

That former version of myself is no longer (“I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now/Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead’”); the breath of God has brought literal life back into that very same crib, and our family has been shaped anew: roughly three years after I dropped those crib pieces off at another mama’s house for her use, they were returned to me in preparation for our son’s arrival. And whose small, eager helping hands were there beside mine, holding the spindled sides together for me as I plucked the screwdriver from its case once again to put it all back together? My salty little superhero.

And while this crib came back to us, the new thing isn’t merely a neat return to what was. The breath of God doesn’t simply stitch things back together, but creates anew. Maybe the new thing isn’t even a crib, maybe it’s in the beautiful form of the child who outgrew it. Or the home — now characterized by a fresh grace or gratitude. Or the mother who was remade through it all. Perhaps it’s friendships deepened in the crevices left by loss, or a concretized awareness of our belovedness in Christ Jesus realized in and through deep suffering. Sometimes it isn’t restoration or a return but a total transformation, something wholly unexpected, something far better than we could ask or imagine (Eph 3:20). “O Lord God, you alone know.” 

The bones are stirring. The graves are opening. The breath is coming. In his great mercy, the God who created everything out of nothing is making all things new, and we will know that the Lord God has spoken, and that he alone has done it.