take a breath

That breeze today, it tickles my cheeks, warm Autumn winds dancing over rising hills, an invisible thumb tracing the lines of my face. I press my hand flat against the pages to keep them from drifting up. That hand, it’s my mother’s hand, perpetually tanned, rooted with veins like a stretch of earth beneath a sprawling tree. I glance up, watch leaves twist and fall like bits of curled paper.

My conversations with God are like this: I’ve learned to listen with my whole being, not just my mind. It’s amazing to me how much intention it takes me to be still so I can hear, even though from here I can see that I am not the one keeping everything going. I am not the one holding the world together. For a moment, I just rest in that truth. Today, maybe you need it too, a fresh wind blowing:

You are not the one holding the world together.

I think of something a wise friend recently shared, radiantly, even over Zoom, “It’s not that I can control what happens in life, but that I can choose to be attuned to God.” I made her wait while I wrote it down, and we laughed as pilgrims do, about the progressive irony of stillness.

I look again at the page, still feeling the memory of those shared smiles:

You were once dead in your trespasses, the writer says, and that word–trespass, it slips over invisible boundaries, through broken fences; it drifts away, falling suddenly down, where guardrails should have been erected. There’s something awful, something ruthless and dangerous about lands and times and lives where everyone does as they see fit, because except in view of God, our dead eyes actually see nothing at all. These are the days and ways when lives blow away, like tumbleweed. They sow the wind, the prophet Hosea said, and reap the whirlwind. Always, the winds of change, but two kinds: breath or chaos, Spirit or distraction, the Wind within or the winds without. In the New Testament the one word, pneuma, means wind, breath, Spirit; the one word gives new meaning to the call to life and the call to stillness: Take a breath.

I tap my finger on the windblown page. There it is, my story: I was once as barren as that shedding tree will be, emptied of song and leaves and the skittering twitter of life.

But because of his great love for [me}, God, who is rich in mercy, made [me] alive with Christ.

Ephesians 2:4-5

I see the truth, plain: I am not the subject, not the Protagonist, not the hero. I inhale deeply, considering. I can stop trying to be the hero. I also see this: before I recognized my own Winter, God had planned the Spring.

Because of His great love. When my own resolve spirals away and I feel bare, when the shadows of wasting things begin to obscure my view, I go to God, and this is what he shows me, every touch of his hands bringing the truth in focus, every exhale of His breath making me alive. I bend down to look more closely and find the word–the Greek pollen, rendered “great,” and I smile. It means multitudinous. I can’t find any etymological link between that word and our English word of the exact same spelling, and yet, I can’t help but think of yellow dust carried on the wind, that sticky, vibrant, germinating coat cloaking everything. We breathe it and sneeze it and try to wash it off of temporary things; we discuss the relentlessness, the copiousness of it. Every Spring we say, “There’s so much this year, isn’t there?” It’s as though each new season of dying makes us forget all that possibility for life. The pollen drains away in rainy waves, swirling down the streets.

For a moment now, I just receive God’s great love, like new clothes, covering over me, bringing me to bud.

Across the street, a dog barks; a neighbor’s voice rises, clear and sharp. The wind carries the sound through a channel between our houses, it bumps against walls and windows and roofs, over shingles worn by weather. The Spirit is like that wind, carrying the voice of God. I lift my eyes; I crane my neck. I pray for ears that hear.

Because He’s rich in mercy. Mercy, more than a relenting from wrath, is a kindness toward suffering people married to the desire to do something to help them. God’s mercy motivates my rescue; God mercy moves me to rescue.

But because of his great love for [me}, God, who is rich in mercy, made [me] alive with Christ.

I look up and watch the leaves twirl. Bird feeders sway on a shepherd’s hook in the yard. For a moment, I am still while the whole world moves. It takes a ceasing to remember that I live not by what or how well I do but because of the character and glory of God–because of His great love, because of His extravagant mercy. He made me alive with Christ. It takes a dying to be raised, and risen, I bear fruit. It takes a Fall, right into His arms, or maybe a twisting in just the right wind, to finally and fully live.