Basic for Granted

This past week I was struck with an inter­est­ing and unex­pected life les­son.  After a blessed Mon­day, thanks to a gen­er­ous invi­ta­tion to a great round of golf, I came down that after­noon with a small cough.  Later that night the cough felt like a rag­ing fire in my lunges and I was hav­ing a hard time breath­ing com­fort­ably.  Tues­day fol­lowed filled with more cough­ing and more short­ness of breath.  Finally at mid­night on Tues­day after a bat­tery of cold and flu meds I woke up and could not catch my breath.

Despite my best effort I could not take a sat­is­fy­ing breath.  It was if some­one was sit­ting on my chest.  At this point I became just a lit­tle wor­ried.  I went down­stairs and asked my wife to use her finally tuned med­ical skills to deter­mine if I was just being a wuss or if I should head to the ER to get looked at.  She sug­gested the lat­ter, thankfully.

I know what idiot dri­ves him­self to the ER while he can’t breath well.  I am a guy, what else is there to say.

On the way there, still try­ing to take a breath I was struck by how much time I had spent think­ing about this basic gift of breath­ing.  Each day we breath in an out thou­sands of times, in a life time mil­lions maybe even bil­lions of times and yet we never think about this most basic life sus­tain­ing bless­ing that most of us enjoy with rel­a­tive ease and security.

Finally after a thank­fully short ER process they hooked me up with some Oxy­gen, and some breath­ing treat­ments to open up my lungs and I was finally able to take deep soul sat­is­fy­ing breaths.  I felt my shoul­ders, back, neck, and chest relax and was so thank­ful to be able to breath again.

I know, get to the point, right.  While I was hav­ing this expe­ri­ence, maybe it was the lack of air, or the delu­sion of sick­ness… but songs like “this is the air I breath” started going through my mind… and “as a deer pants for water, so my soul longs after thee”.  This idea of long­ing that which we take most for granted became a vivid real­ity.  More impor­tantly the spir­i­tual sig­nif­i­cance of breath, of life giv­ing air, of the spirit of God in whose image we have been imprinted with and whose Spirit dwells within those who call Him Lord.

So many of us take His pres­ence for granted.  His sus­tain­ing of the most basic ele­ments of life… our beat­ing heart, our flow­ing blood, our breath, our brain… He sus­tains, gra­ciously sus­tains, every aspect that is crit­i­cal to our sur­vival that we never even think about until it is chal­lenged.  We for­get God, above all, until we notice we no longer expe­ri­ence His pres­ence.  And much like my dif­fi­culty in breath­ing made me appre­ci­ate breath­ing, we notice when life get’s dif­fi­cult how long it has actu­ally been since we have had a long sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence in just bask­ing in the pres­ence of God.  In just tak­ing a deep, long, soul fill­ing, breath of Christ’s pres­ence in our life and enjoy the ben­e­fit of His close­ness.  And as so many of have said, if God no longer feels close, guess how moved.

So take a moment, a few moments, and spend time rec­og­niz­ing God’s gra­cious and His pres­ence in the world.  Thank him for His pres­ence even if you have not noticed it recently.  And more impor­tantly thank Him for all the gifts He gra­ciously gives that you and I never even noticed until they are taken away or inhib­ited in any way.  Bask in His pres­ence, fill your soul with the pres­ence of His love, med­i­tate on His word and allow His word’s to sink deep.  Do some­thing He has gifted you to enjoy!

Breath, breath deep.  God is good