The Air I Breathe
Micah had an asthma attack last night. It was around midnight, and he was crying that he couldn’t breathe. I rushed into the room with his inhaler and tried to calm him down so that he could get the ventolin puffs. But he was too distressed to take a good deep breath in. I tried to stay calm, but I was also panicking, because if he didn’t breathe in the much-needed medicine, he could literally run out of breath.
Eventually, he was able to get enough of the medicine in his system to stop wheezing and coughing, but he woke up two more times in the night needing additional puffs.
It’s a scary thing to run out of breath.
A few years ago I read an incredible book – When Breath Becomes Air, a memoir by Dr. Paul Kalanithi, who battled stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It’s an eloquent, interesting, achingly inspiring story of a surgeon who learns what it is to be a patient, to be not just a philosopher musing about death but an actual dying man taking his last breath.
The title of his autobiography says it all – breath is only breath when there is life.
Martin Luther wrote,
“To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”
So many times I get so preoccupied with “life” that I neglect to pray more than the perfunctory meal-time or bed-time prayers. Then I feel suffocated by the pressures of life, the responsibilities, the to-do lists, the negative thought-patterns, and I long for new life, for fresh air –
Then I remember that breathing is not as automatic as it should be, because like an asthmatic patient, our souls need support to breathe. Our minds and hearts become inflamed with the relentless pursuits and pressures of the world and we need that extra support to be refreshed and renewed.
The prayers I get to share with my prayer partners is like ventolin for my spirit struggling to strive for hope and kindness in a day that wants to be grumpy and tired.
The prayers I breathe out towards God in my solitude fills my soul with that much-needed relief that allows me to trust, surrender, and be reborn.
There is a song by Michael W Smith that says:
This is the air I breathe
This is the air I breathe
Your holy presence living in me
This is my daily bread
This is my daily bread
Your very word spoken to me
And I – I’m desperate for you
And I – I’m I’m lost without you
This is the air I breathe
Prayer gives me the oxygen, the clarity, to see beyond the mountain before me, to know that heaven cares.
We may commune with God in our hearts; we may walk in companionship with Christ. When engaged in our daily labor, we may breathe out our heart’s desire, inaudible to any human ear; but that word cannot die away into silence, nor can it be lost. Nothing can drown the soul’s desire. It rises above the din of the street, above the noise of machinery. It is God to whom we are speaking, and our prayer is heard” (Ellen White, The Privilege of Prayer).
by: Jinha Kim
"But those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." John 4:14