Life is a breath

The act of breathing is phenomenal. To call it an act gives us humans too much credit. Breathing is as involuntary as the sunrise. It needs no impetus. It happens when it’s supposed to. Breathing has nothing to do with us. If we had to initiate every bodily process involved with inhaling and exhaling, we’d have very little mental capacity left for much else.

We don’t have to worry about that because God engineered our bodies to breathe on their own. We can make a conscious effort to inhale and exhale, but breathing is an automatic reflex controlled by the nervous system. 

With each breath, the diaphragm draws air into the lungs, where an invisible exchange takes place—oxygen in, carbon dioxide out—sustaining every cell in the body. A passive process, never demanding our attention or needing our permission. It is a chemical, mechanical, anatomical miracle. It is also a mundane, nothing-to-see-here kind of operation. The beauty of this is breathtaking. Pun intended.

The average human takes 25,000 breaths each day. To say we don’t give it a second thought is an overstatement—we don’t give it a first thought! Breathing is background noise. We don’t notice it until it stops. And when it stops, so does everything else.

Breath is life. And, like life itself, breath is a borrowed thing. No breath belongs to us. It passes through, does what it’s good for, and exits as unnoticed as it entered. A typical breath cycle lasts less than six seconds. Oxygen from that breath reaches the bloodstream in milliseconds and leaves the body almost immediately.

This is life. A passing through. Suddenly we are here, then suddenly we are not. One of the strangest elements of grief is the trauma of “But they were just here.” How can a person be so alive in one moment, and not alive at all in the next?

Because life is a breath.

The psalmist cried out to God about this.

“My entire lifetime is just a moment to You;
 at best, each of us is but a breath.” (Psalm 139:5)

The Hebrew word used there for “breath” is hevel. The image is of a vapor or mist. Something that appears for a moment then disappears. No one can grasp it or hold on to it.

The book of Ecclesiastes, considers life and the full gamut of its pursuits. Solomon concludes that all is hevel. Scholars translate Solomon’s hevel as “meaningless.” But Solomon’s point is not that life is without purpose; he’s saying that we can’t grasp it. We cannot take hold of it and subdue it according to our own will. We cannot take it into our hands and manipulate it into giving us good outcomes. The more we try to grasp it, the more it slips away from us. We can reach out and touch it, but even as we are in the midst of it, we cannot control it. It exists on its own terms. 

The only thing to do with life is to let it be.

We must come to terms with life as a vapor. An ungraspable substance dancing through time, swirling into unpredictable circumstances until it fades into eternity.

We must come to terms with the hevel of it all.

This is not a fatalistic theology. This is a beautiful reality that will keep us from suffocating under the weight of our own striving.

It’s not just that life is over before you know it. A quick Google search for the phrase “life is short” will retrieve hundreds of pithy platitudes about what we need to do to make the most of life. Count our blessings, laugh more, and make memories while we can. These things ring true, but they are not the whole truth. Sure, life is relatively brief, but the big truth is that life is not ours. It never has been and it never will be ours.

When God created the first man, Adam, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7).

Life is but a breath, and the breath belongs to God. God’s breath is necessary for life. When our spiritual oxygen supply is cut off, we lose much more than our breath; we lose our life.

Just as trees exhale oxygen, our Creator breathes out grace. True, abundant life comes from taking deep, intentional breaths of it.

This reminds me of a lyric from a poem I wrote last year, A New Thing:

I inhale grace,
I exhale praise.

When we breathe in the grace of God, the natural byproduct is praise. Everybody’s praise looks different, of course. But when God’s grace oxygenates our gifts, glory happens. His glory, not ours. It is this grace-praise breath cycle that keeps us truly alive. It’s the cycle of life. Grace deprivation is fatal to everyone.

I often say that I write because if I don’t, I will die. During seasons when I am writing less, I feel the suffocation in my soul. Writing is how I engage with the breathing cycle of grace. I cannot write anything without it, and when I put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard), what happens is an act of praise. A natural exhalation, almost as involuntary as the physical respiratory process.

Yes, life is but a breath. The good news is that we can breathe deep. Life can be the enchanting breath you take when you’re standing on the beach, sand between your toes, inhaling the salty sweetness of the ocean that seems to reach into the caverns of your soul. Life can be like that, only better.

Many of us suffer from spiritual hypoxia. Taking shallow, hurried breaths of grace. Barely getting enough to survive, but never enough to thrive. We lack the spiritual discipline to slow down and take a deep breath. As a result, we have what I call “soul fog”. It’s like brain fog, but in the soul. When we don’t breathe in enough grace, we lack spiritual clarity and vitality.

Deep, grace-filled breaths resuscitate us into the life Jesus died for us to live. The Bible makes special mention of Jesus’ last breath on the cross. In that final exhale, He made a way for our first true inhale. A way for us to no longer be deprived, but filled with grace.

Now all that is left is to breathe. Stop grasping and breathe. Stop striving and breathe.

Just stop. And breathe.