Detroit Breathes Again

In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Whole neighborhoods stood hollow — 78,000 abandoned buildings, streetlights dark for miles, emergency response times averaging nearly an hour. National magazines ran cover stories declaring the city finished. Photographers treated its ruins like a modern Pompeii, something to document but never restore.

Then something shifted. Not all at once, and not from a single source. Community groups began reclaiming vacant lots, planting gardens where crack houses once stood. Small business owners invested in storefronts everyone else had written off. Neighbors who had every reason to leave chose instead to stay and rebuild, block by block, street by street. By 2025, downtown hummed with life that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier.

When Ezekiel stood in that valley, the bones were not just dead — they were dry. Long dead. Past the point where anyone reasonable would hope. And yet the Almighty asked a question that must have felt absurd: "Can these bones live?" Ezekiel answered the only honest way: "Sovereign Lord, You alone know."

God did not ask Ezekiel to engineer the resurrection. He asked him to prophesy — to speak life over death, to proclaim promise over evidence. And the Spirit of the Living God did what no urban planner, no economist, no human effort alone could do. He breathed, and the dead lived.

Whatever valley you are standing in today, the One who commands the wind has not finished speaking.