learning to breathe
I can hear Riley running behind me now, feet crunching on the glittering asphalt, her breaths ragged and shallow, and I smile, remembering a conversation I’d had with her about breathing. Riley has been training to run a 5K.
Here we all are, just a few days past Christmas, on the other side of the grand gifting, with needles from the tree scattered all over the floor, and I’m thinking maybe we’re all still feeling a little out of breath?
“Look, it’s going to feel like the opposite of what you want to do,” I had told Riley, while we were still warm-up walking, “but you need to inhale as deeply and slowly as you can through your nose and exhale as slowly and completely as you can through your mouth. Take full breaths and notice them.”
In scripture, this life we’re living has been described as a race set out for us by God.
“Let us run with endurance the race set out for us,” the writer of Hebrews urged, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy before him endured the cross….”
I’ve been running a long time, distances as short as a mile and as long as a marathon, and I’ve trained for years. I gave Riley this little tutorial about breathing remembering just how hard it is to breathe during the early stages of training, when regardless of what your brain knows, your body responds as though you’re running out of air. I explained and demonstrated, and as I drew a full breath in through my nose, she laughed, guffawed right there on the sidewalk, like I’d made a joke.
These days, it feels like our whole world is gasping for air, trying to remember how to breathe.
Anxiety, with it’s breath-stealing attacks, and panic, which makes a person feel like death might just be imminent, have become real-life hardships to record numbers of people, and beyond that, hurry and busyness, the chief symptoms of chronic soul diseases like productivity and performance and self-reliance, have pressed nearly all of us to the point that slowing down feels like a dream and rest an unattainable goal of mythic proportions.
If we get a holiday break, we wake up in the days before the return to our normal routines dreading the run and that feeling that comes when we just can’t seem to breathe. This is an awful feeling, one no one who has experienced it could ever minimize, that gut-wrenching fear that rises and screams its threatening, destructive curses, undermining all rationality and truth, urging us all to just quit trying.
Without a doubt, we all long for limitless, full, unhindered breath.
So, Riley laughed, full and loud, her eyes dancing, as if I was being tremendously funny, with all my talk about inhaling slow and full, exhaling slow and complete, while she’s running.
Maybe you’re thinking it too, that it’s a lovely idea, that you could actually learn to breathe, that you could ever actually take full breaths, but maybe not a very realistic one.
“No, really,” I’d said to her. “I know it sounds crazy, but trust me, this will train your body not to freak out. Because what makes you want to stop during a run of this distance isn’t that your legs hurt; it’s that your body thinks you can’t breathe.”
“Yes,” Riley said, suddenly sobering, her arms pumping into the walk. “That’s true.”
Interesting, that pnuema, the Biblical Greek word translated Spirit in the pages of the New Testament also means breath, which puts an entirely new spin on what it means to “catch your breath” or to train to breathe as part of training to run your race. In truth, the Holy Spirit represents the only limitless breath a person can ever experience. In a spiritual sense, to breathe, then, is to live in the Spirit, that is, to live the life that is truly life, which is something God wants for you, which is something He can train you to do through all of life’s rhythms and seasons, regardless of their mood or pace. Life in the Spirit was never meant to be a reality consigned to quiet times and slower or less challenging seasons, even if a healthy experience should include both rhythms of work and rhythms of rest. There is a time for everything, as the wise writer of Ecclesiastes promised.
“Try it,” I’d urged Riley, audibly drawing in an exaggerated breath, and she’d managed one strong inhale before dissolving again into laughter.
Anyone who has been running for a while understands this incredulity, and anyone who has trained someone to run has also listened to the inexperienced runner describe with exactitude the unique nature of their particular issue with breathing, why the encouragement to do the counterintuitive thing and actually force their bodies to take long, slow, deep breaths while they run simply will not work in their case.
“I think my lungs are just not designed for this,” someone told me once, which sounds oddly similar to what some harried spiritual seekers say during discussions about noticing the presence and activity of God—taking those slow, deep inhales, those slow, complete exhales–even when life feels frantic. “I’m just too scatterbrained for that level of concentration.”
The thing is, it’s one thing to talk about how to breathe and another to practice on the run. The truth is that training words often don’t sink in until determination in practice forces the body to learn a new way. Intentionality around active practice, then, takes on critical importance. No one likes discipline while they experience it, but afterward, as the writer of Hebrew said, peaceful fruit results.
I had a pretty good idea that once Riley took off running, she’d forget everything about this conversation anyway. From what I can hear now, that ragged, desperate gasping for air, this is exactly what has happened. To her credit though, she remains determined to run, even if the breathing is a struggle she has to work out in the process. In like manner, we Christ-followers determine to follow Jesus and begin to do so while learning how to follow Him.
I slow my pace until I’m nearly running in place, holding back so Riley can catch up a little, and then I start exaggerating my breathing the way I told her, so she can see.
There’s this phrase in Hebrews 12 that pretty much sums up discipleship, looking to Jesus, and the Biblical Greek word there translated looking actually describes a two-step process happening in tandem. We who are trained by the Lord learn to look away from everything else while we learn to fix our gaze completely on the One who can show us exactly how to run our race.
I’m thinking of this, wondering if Riley can see my chest slowly rising and falling as I run ahead of her, if she’s watching me closely the way I still absolutely always need to watch Christ.
The human race amounts to a long line of runners in training.
“Look,” I call behind me. “Take deep breaths and notice them. You can breathe. You can do this!”
Yesterday, she had stopped cold during two of the running intervals, the first that had required her to sustain the run for a full five minutes, but this is what happens during the first weeks of a runner’s training. You run and your body panics, responding to the fact that this activity will naturally require more resources than seem to be available to you, with your immature and limited perspective on breathing. You haven’t learned how to breathe, but instead of understanding this situation, you believe you are running out of air. You begin to think, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t so hard you begin to believe it, and stopping seems to be the only solution to your predicament. Without encouragement, it can be easy to subscribe to a false idea, that to run the race is to feel permanently out of breath, that the only way to breathe is to stop running completely. It can be easy to blame our circumstances instead of regarding them as an opportunity for deeper training.
“I can do this!” Riley calls out from just behind me, agreeing in enthusiastic response, her voice strong and steady evidence of the fact that she does have breath to spare, even if it doesn’t feel like it to her. I remember, as I always do in training, the four-time marathoner who ran beside me for the last mile of my first marathon, encouraging me to focus on the sounds at the finish line, telling me that I could finish, even if it felt like I couldn’t. I’m pretty sure that without her persistence both in talking me through and traveling with me, I’d have quit that race. So here I am, running with Riley instead of telling her how to run and leaving her to it.
God shows us His beautiful, generous grace in this, that He hasn’t made looking to Jesus this lofty, nebulous idea but instead gives us friends and mentors, some running beside us and some slightly ahead. He likewise intends to make us the reflection of Christ to others running beside and behind. He has not, in any sense, asked us to run alone. He is with us, and in Him, we are also with each other.
How truly wonderful, then, that as we all sweep up those pesky tree needles and turn the corner into a new year, we’re not alone with our feelings of reluctance or our ragged breaths, that we can, receiving in gulps the generous breath of God, practice together as we encourage each other to breathe.
Inhale, slow and deep. Exhale, full and complete.
Notice the breaths, notice the Spirit, and whatever you do, keep on running.
If you listen, you can hear it now, ever so faintly, the sounds of all that cheering at the finish.
