Ezekiel 36:8-12: in context

Earlier in his book, Ezekiel was told to set his face against the mountains of Israel and announce their ruin, the shrines thrown down and the land emptied. Now, many chapters later, God turns to the very same mountains and says the opposite. This time the word to the hills is not judgment but a future.

What is striking is that God speaks directly to the land itself, as if to a person. You mountains of Israel, he says, put out your branches and yield your fruit to my people, for they are about to come home. I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you will be plowed and sown. He promises the ruined hillsides that their cities will be filled again, that people and animals will multiply on them, that the burned places will be rebuilt. Then a line that goes past mere repair: I will settle you as you were before, he says, and you will do better than at your beginnings. It is not only restoration, it is improvement beyond the original. And he promises the land will never again devour its people or rob them of their children, the way war and famine and exile had done.

The picture is of God standing over a wrecked and abandoned place and speaking its future to it out loud, promising it more fruit than it ever had. He addresses the wreckage, not around it. What ruined thing in my life have I written off as finished, that God might be addressing directly, with a future, and one better than its beginnings?