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Jesus isn't cool, He never was cool, so stop trying to make that happen.

I was recently approached by a member of the Delta Mu Beta Alpha Alpaca Gamma Sting Ray Christian society on the sidewalk of the University where I am taking my last prerequisite classes before medical school.

As an aside, it is very strange to be enrolled in college classes once you've already graduated from college. Like some ridiculously amateur form of espionage, I am constantly gaping fascinated at the humanity that swirls by me, trying to understand what makes these college kids tick and wondering at the strange disconnect I feel with people my age. I say espionage, because no one ever believes I've actually already done my 4 years of time. In fact, they assume I'm a freshman that graduated early from high school. This presupposition is encouraged by the fact that my hair is never done, I constantly show up in workout clothes, and am usually staring awkwardly at people. Cool.

Anyways, I was identified, scouted, and bagged, as I saw this girl observing me from 200 yards away and begin casually closing in, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to assume the walking pattern of a drunk bumblebee through the crowd of humanity grouped on the sidewalk. Never breaking her gaze, she honed in on her target; my cursory glance at her producing a sinking in the stomach associated with answering your phone and hearing the too-cheery telemarketer on the other end. The apprehended prey knew it was caught.

At 20 yards, her bloodhound on a scent demeanor changed, and she bounced up to me traversing the dusty pavement in the glaring sun, her smile a little too bright. She looked like she was trying to cover up hesitation with cheerfulness; the result making her overly bubbly, her movements somewhat forced and jerky, her smile somewhat plastered. Her neon tank with the words 'Padre 2013', paired with the skinny jeans cutting off circulation to her legs and trendy toms on her feet, was an overwhelming combination.
"Hi! Do you have a minute!?"

I looked around for an escape route, knowing the multiplicative properties of these people's 'minutes'. Nothing in sight.
I wanted to be nice. I felt sorry for her, especially since she'd chosen me as her proselytism mission. What a bad gig. So I answered.
"Hey, yeah, sure, I have a minute".

The torrential outpouring of words came like Niagara falls released after a month-long dam.
"Awesome! Great! Hi! I'm so-and-so from Delta Kappa Alpaca Gamma Sting Ray society here on campus, totally awesome, have you ever heard of us!?"

 Well, yes I had. Vaguely, once or twice, in passing. And by that I mean every time their neon flyers peppered the lawns of campus; valiantly attempting to keep up with the 400 other societies in an advertising hurricane of brightly colored pieces of paper. Or when their attractive hipster models would crowd the green lawn, inviting you with a winning smile to drink organic coffee and have open Jesus discussion. As opposed to closed Jesus discussion, I guess.
"Yeah, yeah I have heard of you guys."

Another blinding smile.
"Great! Awesome! Have you ever attended one of our events? We have lots of cool events with free pizza, snacks, drinks, you know!"

Yeah, I knew.
"No, I haven't ever come to one, but I have heard of some of the events, yeah".

Her face lit up even brighter upon hearing that.
"Awesome! Well I just wanted to invite you to our night of praise tomorrow night, there'll be snacks, drinks, and you can come worship with us."

At this point, I was interested as to why the purpose behind all this fancy get up hadn't yet been mentioned. I mean, we'd covered what I'd get for showing up (food, oh holy grail of college motivators), what I'd participate in when I showed up, what time I'd show up...but why was I really showing up? It was a curious position to be in, with this Alpaca Sting Ray society member thinking I had no inkling of what Christians were about; on the other side of the great Christian social group. For a split second, I felt a strange sensation of being behind enemy lines, "So this is what we look like". I decided to play dumb. It wasn't hard.

"Oh ok, yeah, that sounds awesome! (You see my incognito persona supported by use of college kid lingo!) Um, but like, worship....what do you mean?".

Now we'd come to the question, and I could see her sightly squirm, her smile a little dimmer.
"Well, I mean it's really fun, we all like, get together, and chill, and eat snacks, and worship God. I mean, if you're into that kind of thing. You should totally come out!"

Her eyes were begging me to just agree and move on, her quota of people done for the day. So I smiled, and told her if I had free time, I'd come and check it out. Relief flooded her face and she bounded away after a peppy, "Awesome! Have an awesome day!".




In a world where technology allows societal acceleration at previously impossible rates, If you have a product to sell, marketing is the daily burgeoning communication of the masses. The niche is narcissism, and self sells.
So often, I have heard the lamenting talks of evangelicals, stressing the importance of the church changing to keep pace with modern progression. It sounds like this: We are the face of Jesus to a dying world, and we have to be able to communicate with them: talk like them, think like them, look like them. They can't love Jesus if they don't ever meet Him, and they won't ever meet Him if they aren't attracted to Him, and so we must be His attractive, inviting, exciting face, the one that people are drawn to, the one that makes them want to know more.
 There's just one problem.

Jesus was not attractive. And neither was the way he lived. He was not a celebrity, He was homeless. He wasn't a political, conquering hero of the people, He was a dissenter on the fringe.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die." And when you take a look at how previous disciples lives have gone, it brings sobering perspective.
The original 12: some crucified, some crucified upside down, some burned alive, some beheaded. The list goes on.
More current disciples: Speared through in Ecuador, Hung in a concentration camp, raped and beaten, died of a brain tumor in a Chinese internment camp. And on and on.

 Could it be that our perception of what it means to follow Christ has been ever-so-slightly warped? Could it be that we are living, out loud, a lie? A lie that says that Jesus is for you. That God has special plans for you. That you should pursue the dreams He put in your heart for you because He wants to make your life beautiful and exciting and prosperous, full of shining hope and uniquely planned purpose.
Jesus is for the glory of His Father. You are an inconsequential sinner, a result of the fall, whose infinite value and worth are solely given to you because God Himself values you deeply. Your purpose is worship through obedience.

Is true discipleship and costly grace being exchanged for garnering a fan-club following? The issue here is not simply ill-intentions, but misrepresentation. Worship is a life position, not a hang-out activity. Jesus is not a rock star in need of publicity, He's a suffering Messiah who calls you to obedience. Being a disciple is not a fun self-help club that shows you how the word needs your unique gifts, it is a daily burying of your self, your dreams, and your life for the sake of Christ.

Is our marketing of Jesus destroying true discipleship?

I don't know. How many Christians believe that they are called to come and die?

For the dazed

Sometimes, life can feel like an unbroken haze of PTSD. Trauma isn't an event, but a state-a vacuum-that sucks you in no matter how many times you try to throw it off.

Assaulted, by guilt, by shame, by fear. Over everything.

I was sitting at a stop sign on my way to work last week, under an enormous billboard. A seductively smiling blonde woman in a white bikini towered over me, emblazoned words across her bare upper thighs: "Get back the life you've always wanted". And maybe none of us actually believe that the key to content living is being a blonde size 2, but most of us do harbor some kind of shame over our bodies (or physical appearance in general), and how unattractive we think we must look to everyone else.

Light blinked green, my foot on the accelerator jerked my car forward, and I, lost in thought on the thousands of dollars we spend on what we think will make us worth it.

If shame's not your thing, there's always guilt. If you have any conscience and social awareness at all, being born in a country where rape, starvation, murder, or theft is not something you will experience on a daily or weekly basis can make your heart clench listening to stories of sex slaves, concentration camps prisoners, and the disenfranchised in squalor poverty. Compassion is beautiful, and the trip to twisted guilt that demands you owe something because of their terror and pain isn't as far as you'd think.

Fear isn't in short supply either. In fact, a little old man at the gym recently asked me about my plan to pay for medical school, and my response was a halfhearted, "Well, it's going to have to be loans, because there really is no other way for me to come up with that kind of money in 3 months". The subsequent eyes widening when he heard the amount was quickly followed by a disapproving/sympathetic clucking of the tongue, as he told me, "Well, look on the bright side-in a few years, our government is going to collapse, and when our system fails, you won't have to worry about those loans anymore".

Thank you, you little old wizened pillar of consolation.

Offenses mount; our defenses fall. 'Stressed' is how most of us describe our status, and we worry worry worry about how little control we have over the world. Over our jobs, our families, our image, our safety, our health, those being tortured, those starving, those being exploited, the American church, the state of our government, the state of our relationships, the persecuted church, the state of our bank accounts, the state of world affairs, the state of our future. Our hearts squeeze, minds unfocused, we fidget, force smiles, gaze preoccupied, head down, shoulders tightened, we miss it. We miss the beautiful now. And even that realization serves to stress us even further.

Someone wrote to me once, "To worry is to dethrone God, to deny His power, ability, and authority". To be honest, that's a little vague for my comfort, because there is no Scripture that says that anything we do, think, or say, can literally detract anything from God. He's God. Shutting your eyes and saying it's dark at 3pm. doesn't make the sun any less bright. But perhaps, an addition makes this true:

To worry is to dethrone God, to deny His power, ability, and authority in our lives. To shut your eyes and say it's dark at 3 pm. does make your perception of life dark.

We mitigate God's power, we confine Him to small things; maybe because we live small lives, maybe because we're just kind've freaks. Control freaks.

We remove Him from a place of authority and sovereignty, and consolidate Him to the you don't really factor much into the actual solution of this place . The one we never really consider relying on because we've got 700 plans of self-sufficiency. And it works for us, because then, when things work out, we can attribute it to how hard we worked, how smart we are, how capable, how competent! Who feels their need for grace when they're in control?

God is either good, or he's not. He's either completely sovereign, or completely irrelevant. He either deserves our full attention, or to be left behind. He is our complete provider, offering abundant grace, or He cares nothing for and doesn't bother with the details of us. But to worry is to choose. A deliberate choice to remove Him from His rightful place as our Sovereign, our Protector, our Provider, our Healer, our Father, in our lives.

Once He's removed, we're easy targets. Give up central truth and watch how quickly you spiral and fall. Into bitterness, despair, depression, nihilism, cynicism, anger, addiction. Watch how the Gospel of grace becomes ashes in your mouth because you believe it in theory but you won't live it in reality. Watch how you exchange an attitude of humble gratitude for one of stressed-out fretfulness. Watch how you shrink God.

Life.
It can be brutal and unforgiving and terrifying to get out of bed some days, because the weight of the world we carry is far too great. There are only two hands that could ever bear it, and they already have.

Yes, life can be hard. Hard, uncertain, and uncontrollable. But we were never asked to be in control. The Bible does not stress a progression from incompetent sinners to competent leaders. Peter was still hacking off ears, John and James were still duking it out with the others about seating arrangements in eternity after a couple of years in Jesus's presence. Years. 

Why?

Because Jesus did not say, "Be competent". He didn't put that expectation on us. He didn't say, "Get a hold of yourself and exercise some control over your life".

He said, "Follow Me".

Straight into a life of wild freedom.

I'll tell you my age and relationship status, you tell me my intentions and shortcomings

People are weird.

I find it funny that if you google 'weird', you get a definition that says: 'suggesting something supernatural; uncanny'
Then it gives a great analogy:
"The weird crying of a seal"
Yeah because we can all relate to that here in south Texas, where the only time you'll hear 'crying' and 'seal' in the same sentence is when some redneck is telling you about something gone wrong in his too-far-jacked-up truck engine.
Thanks google. Keeping it relevant since Al Gore spawned the internet. Or whatever.


I had to block another girl on my facebook feed today. It wasn't her, it was me (I lied, it was totally her). This brings the number up to a lot, and pretty soon I'm only going see 2% of my friends in my newsfeed. Which, as long as it's the 2% that don't irritate me, is fine.

No but seriously

I had to block her because she brought the total tally of 'Professing-Christian-and-I-married-young-and-am-super-defensive-and-outspoken-about-it-on-the-internet' girls to seven hundred and twenty-two, which as we all know is seven hundred and twenty-two too many.
I just lost it. I started to read her post, which was a response to an inflammatory article that has recently sparked a flurry of polarized responses, all vehement.
The culprit inflammatory article that incited the fiery flames of response like flint to dry tinder is titled something like '23 things to do before you're engaged by 23'.
It's written by some girl (Who I'm assuming is 23) that made some pretty strong statements, about marriage, about people marrying young for the wrong reasons, and ends in a list (23 things, go figure) of ridiculous things to do while you're still single, such as, but not limited to:
 'eat an entire jar of nutella'
 'get a passport'
 'hang out naked in front of a window all day'

I don't advocate, recommend, or understand the list (why would anyone hang out naked in front of a window all day??). Actually, I don't even care about the list, or the arguments. I have my own opinion of it all. But I am irritated with the response that plopped itself ignorantly in my newsfeed, that is a recycled echo of the same argument that seems to frequently come up.


It's condescending tone rubbed me wrong, as it began with a patronizing 'I'm sorry you don't have a Godly view of marriage' and went on to tell the author 'if you did find a perfect person, what makes you think they'd want to marry you?'

Well aren't we just oozing Jesus all over the place?

Then, to follow such a benevolent opener, she went on, enumerating how being married is actually just a 'journey of learning to love someone else like Jesus does', and learning to 'be more like Jesus'.
I've heard it before. Same lines, almost word for word, from so many girls like this one. How they are so excited to learn to be like Jesus by serving their husband and being his help-meet.
You know what else teaches us to be more like Jesus? Being physically persecuted for our faith. Having God say 'no' over and over to what our heart longs for. Losing things we love. Interestingly, I rarely hear about how much these girls are looking forward to being made perfect through suffering in a prison cell, or being made holy through the death of a close friend.
Why? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because what they are really looking forward to is NOT becoming like Jesus. Maybe, what they are really looking forward to, IS being married. 
I'm ok with that. I want to rejoice with you who rejoice.

 I just don't want to hear your spirituality-veiled, pretentious, gushing.

She ends with an exhortation to millennials (Hey, that's me!) to 'not be shallow' and 'live a life full of purpose, love, and Jesus!', and not be afraid of "'settling' when God brings a great man or woman in your life, because you'll go on all sorts of adventures together!" (exclamation points are all hers, by the way). Well, thank you for your advice that comes from less than a year of experience being married at age 22. In science, we call that 'insufficient data to form an opinion'. Kidding, that's just what I call it.

The comments, I'll spare you; they were even worse. Filled with remarks about how sorry everyone felt for the girl that wrote the '23' blog post (And we all know 'She's obviously bitter, I feel sorry for her' is a patronizing statement that's code for 'She's a pagan moron, I'm so glad I know the righteous viewpoint that Jesus would propagate if He were here'), and how they'd much rather make out with their husbands than a stranger (Another thing I don't advocate on the 23 list).
One person even left a comment that called her 'an immature skank who doesn't know what love is'. A comment that was promptly liked by the girl who vomited her overspiritualized, poorly reasoned opinion all over my newsfeed.
That was such an obviously offensive comment, that I looked at that commenter's profile.
She's a young, newly married, preteen counselor at a baptist church.
I cannot tell you how much that surprises me, given that she's a cookie cutter replica of...well....a whole heck of a lot of other girls in her same situation.

I have heard this. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. This literally peppers my facebook with blogs and status updates and notes all the time. And the arguments all say the
Same.
Exact.
Thing.

The 'Christian-and-single-because-we-don't-settle' camp scowls, and criticizes the intentions of the 'we-married-young' camp as being faulty, unfounded, and immature.
The 'Christian-and-married-young' camp howls about how beautiful and Godly marriage is, and how much they're going to be like Jesus.

Back and forth, defense after defense, justification after justification, accusation behind accusation. And while we tell each other how the way we're working out our faith with fear and trembling is the best way, and send slighting, veiled (some not so veiled) insults back and forth, I wonder if Jesus shakes His head at how ridiculous His children can be sometimes.

If Jesus had a facebook, I wonder if He'd block me from showing up in His newsfeed.

The cure for loneliness

Loneliness is a razor and an oppression.
A permanent companion that is not as much faithful as it is adhesive.
It's a boomerang, throw it as hard as you can, as far as you can, but sooner or later it finds you again.

It's a hard thing in this world, to be seen. It seems we're all flying breakneck blind on the lie that ahead lies rest.

And we kinda just maybe sorta really desperately wanna know someone has our six, right? To be known, be heard, be assured.
That someone is paying attention.

So we send one more text and post one more status and tweet one more time because really, truly, what is it to be alone and know yourself?
And what does it matter if we gain the whole world and no one acknowledges it? What is success without recognition?

Who's recognizing? We say it's a game, but it's really not, this vying for attention. In your heart you know there's nothing playful about the rising panic that seeps in with the realization that you may be visible but you definitely aren't seen. There's no engaging joy that lives in the silence of speaking and being listened to but never heard.
If value is defined by the one who perceives, how much is it worth to be overlooked? What will you do to be remembered?

Psalm 139 begins: ,"Oh Lord, You have searched me and known me..."
Perhaps C.S. Lewis said it best, speaking of heaven in The Great Divorce

"...all famous. They are all known, remembered, recognized by the only Mind that can give perfect judgement."

Never overlooked, never forgotten, perfectly seen, and wholly known, by the only One whose opinion really carries weight on into eternity.
And certainly, in truth, never alone.

There is no free lunch, but maybe you'd prefer abundant life instead?

"...a lot of things are difficult right now; I wouldn't have chosen life to be this way."

Earnestly swung my legs off the chair his arms hung over the back of, leaning in.

Does proximity makes words truer?

"But God is intentional in our lives, and this, all of this," I opened my arms wide, "has a purpose."

I spoke of broken dreams, tattered expectations-mine-bravely making the last vestiges of an exit. Studies analyzed us millennials; handed us our diagnosis, matter-of-fact. As if you can fix broken by assigning a cause.

The prognosis?

Grim.

We own sky-high stress and depression levels due to our sheltered upbringing and unreasonable expectations of life.

 And who's to say they're wrong?

We were assured we deserve a nice job--son, you can even be the president if you want to!--a solid marriage, a nice family, a nice life, just by virtue of existing. Our parent's generation toiled, so we wouldn't have to. This is our right.

Expectations are high for us.

After being promised free lunch was going to be provided, we're spit into a world where truth that has always been truth is still true.

There is no free lunch.

And if you don't know how to handle disappointment and heartbreak, if you don't know how to work hard and build high and see it all wiped out in a millisecond of disaster, if you don't know how to stoop at the shattered pieces to start rebuilding, you're in for one crash course after another. No wonder we're depressed.

His gaze was intense, expressionless concentration. It unnerved me slightly. He had pretty brown eyes.

Cautiously, deliberately. Arms crossed on his chest, keeping something out. Or in.

 "I...agree. God is intentional with us."

 Leaning backwards against the silent piano, staring at the floor a few inches to my right, as if it would vomit answers. When he spoke, his voice didn't shake, but beneath steadiness I saw a well-worn struggle.

"God is intentional. And the typhoon hit the Phillipines and thousands died. A 7 year old was tortured and murdered. North Korea is executing people in a gymnasium filled with ten thousand onlookers. And God is intentional."

Eyes finally met again, not-so-successfully shuttered. His tone an attempt at an unaffected mood, but those eyes doubted.

Instantly, I was delivered to my earlier statement, a fresh dilemma I knew was gaping unanswerable.

If God is intentional in our lives, it means He's intentional about our pain

Which presents the good ol'-Jeremiah 29:11-Jonah in a cozy fish belly-Anglo Jesus on a felt board Christianity-with a p-r-o-b-l-e-m.

Surely, God could have prevented Sandy Hook, whose haunting anniversary today drags up memories we'd rather forget.

And typhoons.

And atrocities that make 'evil and debased' seem tame descriptions.

And God can prevent thousands of other examples that you can drag, trembling, to the front, and beg someone to make sense of.

"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof..."

Psalm 24:1 is our accusation, we slam the gavel down in despair. If He can do something, and doesn't, well then....

There's a term, "the hand you've been dealt".

Let's clarify. We weren't dealt anything but Eden. Infinite abundance. Shalom. The hand we were dealt was perfect.

We did this. We didn't play by the rules. We still don't.

 I hit you, you steal from me, he shoots them, they hate, she's vindictive. Free will causes all sorts of problems because it's....free.

Life is broken, surely, but not because God broke it.

Perhaps our expectations of God are wrong. Perhaps we have forgotten Jesus was a suffering Savior, not a victorious manager.

"During the days of Jesus' life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the One who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverent submission. Son though He was, He learned obedience from what He suffered." Hebrews 5:7-8

Did you catch that? Jesus struggled. He petitioned God, He cried. He was submissive and faithful.

He was heard by God Who could have saved Him.

And then?

He suffered.

And through suffering, He learned obedience. He learned obedience to death. Remember what He got for obedience?

A cross. A humiliation He didn't deserve, and an agony His life never earned.

And now we stand, claiming to follow Him closely and yet so affronted by His lifestyle. In one breath, praising His defeat of death that declares we are pilgrims on our way to the homeland, in the next breath mutinous at God's allowance of these momentary, light afflictions that achieve eternal glory for us.

We've crowded behind verses we've misconstrued, and formed opinions of God that are not Biblical, and we honestly believe them. We are consumed with our own comfort, so much so, that when real life happens, we are unable to cope, to deal, to suffer well in Christ's footsteps, too busy letting God know that He's really dropping the ball

Who are we, to expect anything less than Jesus Himself was given by the Father?

Perhaps the path to eternal life is more narrow than we thought.

YHWH

Morning brought a quiet thought, dawned on the edge of consciousness.

YHWH is pronounced like breathing.

I’d heard it somewhere, read without understanding, forgotten until this morning. Just where does that first thought of the morning come from anyway?

Yesterday, the last week, the entire last few months, have been a grind. Like uneven gears, I've crushed and cramped and forced against life. A strained breathing-out through grit teeth. Life has been a wildly forced thing.

YHWH is pronounced like breathing

‘What does that even mean?’ I groggily stumped down the stairs in the dark. ‘Breathing doesn't even sound like anything in particular, it just sounds like breath.’

 So I’m completely charming and coherent in the morning, by the way. Dumped coffee in a cup. Dumped even more creamer in. Jangled a few spoons around until I found my favorite (it makes the coffee taste better). Flung myself onto the couch in the dimly lit sitting room. Bible and journal unopened beside me. Steaming coffee (coffee laced creamer) clenched in my stiff fingers.

Tentatively, my tongue tried the first Yaaaw sound.

 ‘Yah. No that’s not right. Yuh. Nope. Yawww. Ok no. I sound like an idiot’. Breath out, two syllables.

‘Ya-way.’   A short, staccato, hurried whisper. Didn't sound like any breathing I’d ever done, unless you count how breath sounds when it’s spit out in quick bursts during sprints.

Somewhere in the cramped rush of exhausted cars on solemn pavement while driving to work,

…among the wild, abrasive, lonely college students prostituting their hearts for attention,

…living with a family whose dynamic has shifted just enough so you don’t quite sit within as before,

 …life had become this. A cramp. A staccatoed force. Something to grit teeth and barrel through, whose events jumble and tumble and clash together and spin off crazy angled directions. If you go fast enough does it stop hurting?

Ok. Let’s try again. Draw a deep breath, like a diver getting ready to take on the Black Sea. Push it out in a whoosh. ‘Yaway’. It sounded cluttered and hurried. Two syllables rushed in one push of breath. Cramped and forced, air squeezing out of lungs. Try again, a deep breath, harder. ‘YAH--way.’. Tight. Condensed syllables. Clipped. Like bullets from a gun, shot out in rapid succession, eager to put distance between them.

‘Are you kidding me? There’s no way that sounds like breathing, unless they’re talking about how you sound when someone knocks the air out of you. Whoomp. ‘Yaway’. Nope. Whoever said that is on crack cocaine’.

Life seems to go that way lately. A short, terse, muttered, forced, ‘Yaweh ,ok? Yah-WEH!’. A burst of breath, spewed from behind tightly clenched lips, originating in an even tighter chest. ‘Yaweh’. Force. Push. Grind. And the pronunciation is all forced and pushed and wrong, and life is all forced and pushed and wrong. The name comes out tangled, and come to think of it, life comes out a little tangled too. Lungs squeeze, chest crushed, syllables mangled, and maybe our heart is a little mangled.

The name of God snarled out in a rush; barrel through life, mindlessly pushing, terrified to feel…what? What is that pain-discontent? Loneliness? Loss? Or maybe the doubt-you may not be enough.

Then it dawned on me-I’d forgotten to breathe in. Come to think of it, I forget to breathe in quite often.

Breathe in, lips slightly parted, lungs swelling, life expanding. Like a whisper in reverse. ‘Yhaaaa’

Let it fall. Let it go. Breathe out. ‘Wheaaa’.

*Disclaimer. I like science. We’re going to do some science now. *

It’s a little known fact among those who are not socially awkward (geeks) that humans breathe in a negative pressure manner. That’s just a strange way of saying this:

 ‘Breathing in’ is actually a consequence of relaxing your diaphragm and muscles between your ribs so that your chest cavity is allowed to expand. Your lungs, consequently, follow suit and expand too, which means they now have less air/volume with respect to air outside your body. Air wants to move to a lower pressure (where there’s less air/volume) and, consequently, rushes into your lungs. The term ‘draw breath’ is a little misleading if you think of it as an active drawing, like you would  pull a bucket full of water on a rope up a well. Think of it as ‘drawing water’ in a basin. By tipping the lip of an empty basin into a stream, you create an empty area that wasn’t there before, and water consequently rushes to fill that empty space.

Breathing out, then, is when your brain signals your diaphragm and muscles between the ribs to contract, lungs get squeezed. It’s the reverse of above in a sense-your muscles clench, make your diaphragm smaller, which causes your lungs to likewise become more confined, and what was before a space of low pressure in the lungs relative to outside, is now high pressure. Air flees the confinement.

Breathing out follows the breathing in. Air is drawn in, expands to fill the space. The oxygen is converted to energy-which helps drive the contraction that forces us to breathe out. It’s supposed to.

You breathe in air when your muscles relax, you breathe out when they contract. Breathing out is driven by breathing in.

*Ok. We’re done with science. Too bad.*

You can white knuckle life and force the living right out of it.

Or you can remember. Breathing takes place in two parts.

Living is not a function of breathing out. Living is a function of breathing in.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

‘Yhaaaa’

‘Wheaaa’.

But you have to keep breathing in, and you have to keep returning to the gentle voice that whispers truth, and you have to keep drawing from the well of life that shows you how to live. No one ever took a deep breath and thought ‘That will hold me for a little while’. No. You get oxygen for the moment, but soon your body uses it up and demands more. So you breathe in again. And again. And when your head hangs, and your limbs are filled with lead, and your heart beats wildly within your chest in agony…you breathe in again. And again.

The way we live is an outpouring of the way we breathe. The body knows what we struggle to learn. That life is in the breathing in, not the breathing out. The lungs have to fill to keep going. And much the same, we need to draw in Jesus, the life He teaches, the grace He gives, more of Him, to keep going. Not breathe out harder. Forcing out His name, mangled on our lips, muttered from behind clenched teeth, out in a hurried breath-this never gave me life.

 Breathe in, lips slightly parted, lungs swelling, life expanding. Like a whisper in reverse. ‘Yhaaaa’

Let it fall. Let it go. Breathe out. ‘Wheaaa’.

He’s here. He’s life. He fills. Relax. Draw in. And if you still feel short of breath, draw in life again. Even if it's a sharp gasp.

‘Yhaaaa.. .Wheaaa’.

Be filled. Because no one ever drew life by breathing out.