Warsaw Rising from the Rubble

In January 1945, when Soviet forces entered Warsaw, they found a graveyard. The Nazis had systematically demolished the city block by block after the 1944 uprising, reducing 85 percent of Poland's capital to ash and broken stone. Entire neighborhoods lay in heaps. The Royal Castle was gutted. Streets where families had lived for generations were unrecognizable corridors of debris. Military analysts declared Warsaw beyond rebuilding. Start over somewhere else, they advised. The city is dead.

The Polish people refused to accept that verdict. In attics and basements across the countryside, they had hidden something remarkable — the 18th-century paintings of Bernardo Bellotto, which captured Warsaw's streets, facades, and rooftops in extraordinary detail. Using these canvases as blueprints, ordinary citizens began hauling bricks from the rubble with their bare hands. Mothers, professors, factory workers — they sorted and stacked and rebuilt, one wall at a time. Within a decade, Warsaw's Old Town stood again, so faithfully restored that UNESCO declared it a world heritage site.

When Ezekiel stood in that valley, surrounded by sun-bleached bones, the Almighty asked a question that must have felt absurd: "Can these bones live?" The prophet answered wisely — "O Lord God, You know." And the Most High did what He has always done. He spoke breath into death, sinew onto bone, life into what every observer had abandoned as hopeless. The God who rebuilt a nation from exile is the same God who stands over every valley in your life, calling dry things to rise.