Just Breathe

I don’t think there will ever be a moment in time when I am not absolutely astonished by the beauty and detail of creation. God blows my mind every single day with this world He has intricately designed to be our home until we are returned to heaven with Him. I could quite literally go on forever and ever about all of the beautiful things He is revealing to me, however I will not make you sit through all of that, for your sanity as well as mine. The biggest thing God has been revealing to me recently has been about one of the most simple tasks we have as human beings, a task that most of the time we don’t even realize we are doing because of its simplicity and how it has been ingrained into our human nature- breathing. “The process of taking air into and expelling it from the lungs”. This is a life-giving task that we always seem to take for granted until we get some sickness and can no longer breathe properly through our nose. Then we spend the duration of our illness longing for the glorious days when we could breathe normally without sounding like Darth Vader.
Now you might be wondering why, out of all of the things that happen in the world, this is the one that is changing the way I look at life. Well, to be honest, I’ve been wondering the same thing and I have yet to find an answer. The only conclusion I can come up with is the fact that my tiny human brain is not even able to comprehend the goodness of God. If all it took was realizing the significance of the breath He puts in my lungs to blow my mind, how many more incomprehensible things are there that the creator of the universe has woven into this world? I get lost just thinking of the idea, which brings me back to the simple act of taking a breath.

Something that I have been struggling with off and on throughout my whole life has been my purpose. For so long I had convinced myself that I wasn’t enough. That I wasn’t a good enough person. I wasn’t a good enough student. I wasn’t a good enough athlete. I wasn’t pretty enough. I wasn’t smart enough. I wasn’t funny enough. I didn’t have enough friends. I didn’t do enough things. I would never measure up and therefore I didn’t have a significant purpose. I fully took on these lies and started to unknowingly find my identity in them. This caused so much insecurity and anxiety in my life through both middle and high school. It was suffocating. I continued to struggle with these things even up until I went to training camp. Slowly over the month and a half in Georgia, God started revealing these lies to me. Lies that the enemy had engrained in my brain. Lies that had become so comfortable and felt so real that I took them as my own. Lies that I told myself so effortlessly and so naturally that I couldn’t even recognize them as lies anymore. That is just who I was, the one who would never be enough. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. To call myself these things was an insult to the Lord most high. The one who created the heavens, the billions of galaxies, every ocean, mountain, tree, and creature that has ever been put into existence. To tell myself these things is to insult one of God’s creations that He loves and made in the very image of himself. He hand-crafted me. None of those things I had been telling myself over the last 7 years had been from Him. That is not who He created me to be and none of it was true. I am still learning what it looks like to find my identity in Him and it has not been easy, but I am so grateful for who He has made me. I am enough, and you are enough too. We are the sons and daughters of the King, that is our identity. Not our friends, not our jobs, not what people say about us. We were all given a purpose on this earth. God didn’t have our names in His mind before the world was even created just to make us purposeless. I find that He  reminds me of this every morning. Every morning He wakes me up with breath in my lungs. God breathed life into MY lungs. The God of the universe would not have wasted time putting breath in my lungs this morning if I didn’t have a purpose to serve on this earth. It’s as simple as that. Let everything that has breath praise the living God!

Another beautiful aspect of God is one of his many names, Yahweh (YHWH). “Yah” represents the inhale and “Weh” represents the exhale. Every single breath we take proclaims the name of the Lord, even from the very beginning of our lives. A baby’s first cry out into the world, the very first breath of our existence speaks the name of God. We leave this world when we take our last breath and God’s name is no longer in our lungs. The first, the last, and every gasp in between whispers the existence of our creator. Every cheer of excitement, every deep moan from the bottom of your soul, every breath held in suspense, fear, and awe. Every single one. In sadness we breathe heavy sighs, in overwhelming joy our lungs feel like they could explode, and to find courage and strength we take a deep breath. Even when I can’t muster the strength to utter anything else, my cries call out His name. Just being alive means I speak His name every second of every day. When I can’t even put my gratitude, and sorrows into words, I know that every breath I take gives Him praise. The average human being takes about 20,000 breaths every day, which adds up to roughly 7.5 million breaths each year. Subconsciously, we proclaim the name of the Lord billions of times throughout our life, without having to say a single word. When I feel as though I’m not enough, I am reminded that I was created in the image of Him and my very existence brings Him glory and praise. Quite literally, everything that has breath praises the living God.

God’s faithfulness and love for us is unmatched by anything in this world, because what can be greater than its own creator? We are guaranteed that life is going to be hard, and we are promised that we will struggle and fall short, but even in our failures, He is with us. In every breath we take, He is there. So next time you don’t feel like you’re enough and you know you can’t do it on your own, remember to just breathe. He hears you whispering his name.