May 31 is the 122nd anniversary of Norman Vincent Peale’s birth. Author, minister, and founder of Guideposts, Dr. Peale, is best known as the father of positive thinking. He continues to inspire and uplift new generations with his legacy of inspiration and optimism.
In everybody’s life, times come when it seems that everything goes wrong. Hopes and plans lie broken around you. The things you looked forward to achieving have failed. The spirit has gone out of you. And, in fact, life seems dead and desolate.
At such times, it will help to read the 37th chapter of Ezekiel. The prophet Ezekiel was taken out by the Lord and shown a wide valley that was full of dry bones stretching as far as he could see. Here a great multitude had perished and their white bones lay stark and desolate. Nothing could appear more hopeless than a valley of dry bones grim and silent.
But the Lord told Ezekiel to believe and affirm that, by God’s power, even these dry bones could live again. “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!’” (verse 4).
The story dramatically tells what happened next: “There was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them” (verses 7-8). Life was renewed, and a great army of living men marched out of the valley of death.
When God’s spirit really comes upon us, the things that are harmonious with His spirit will live in us. Old dead things such as dead hopes, dead dreams, dead ideals, will take on a new vibrant quality. The dead bones of our lives will live again.
Those great hopes and dreams and ideals of yours are not dead—if you let God breathe into them the breath of fresh spiritual life. The spirit of God can revitalize every great thing. With God, life can always be vital, always dynamic. Life is renewable.
