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.