From Rubble to Harvest

In 2014, volunteers with the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative gathered on a stretch of abandoned lots in Detroit's North End. The properties were littered with broken concrete, rusted metal, and sun-bleached debris — urban bones baking under a July sky. Neighbors had stopped believing anything could grow there. The soil itself seemed cursed.

They came with shovels, not bulldozers. They cleared rubble by hand, amended poisoned ground, and pressed seeds into earth everyone else had written off. Within a few seasons, those dead lots were producing thousands of pounds of fresh produce for a neighborhood that had been a food desert for years. Today, where crumbling foundations once lay, rows of collard greens, tomatoes, and kale push through rich, dark soil. Children play between garden beds on land their parents once called hopeless.

This is what Ezekiel saw in that valley. God did not show the prophet the dry bones from a comfortable distance. He set Ezekiel down in the middle of them and asked the hardest question faith ever faces: "Can these bones live?" The honest answer was what Ezekiel gave — "Sovereign Lord, You alone know." But then the breath of the Almighty moved, and death reversed course. Bone joined to bone. Flesh covered them. Life returned.

The same God who turns urban wastelands into gardens promises to breathe His Spirit into your driest, most hopeless valley and make it live again.