Chances are, if you are reading this, when you woke up this
morning you were breathing. If you are
anything like me, you breathe a lot! I am an excellent breather. I breathe all the time. When I am walking, I
am breathing. I can breath while I drive down the road, I can breathe while
eating or reading or watching TV. I’ve been simultaneously breathing the entire
time I wrote down these words. In fact,
I am so good at breathing that I breathe in my sleep. I have done it forever,
and sometime - a long time ago - it just became natural for me. I don’t even have to think about it, it just
happens. I move, I sit, I sleep, I swim –
I breathe!
Okay, a little confession. I realize that we all do these
things. That’s the way God designed
us. In his wisdom, he knew that we would
need to breathe and we shouldn’t have to think about it. It would be best for
us if it was just automatic – and it is.
There are lots of things in our lives that are like that. Our hearts keep beating without our thinking
about it. We don’t have to tell our cells to extract nutrients from within our
blood.
And speaking of that,
what about metabolizing food? Now there’s a crazy thing we never really think
about. Sure, some of us are perhaps too
obsessed with counting calories or fretting over nutrition, but I don’t know of anyone who
stops in the middle of a meal or afterward to concentrate on which proteins to send
to where from their cheeseburger, or what to do with that canole you just sent
down the gullet to be digested and made into parts of you!
In a sense, our digestion can be a magical thing. Sure we
have all heard the phrase, “You are what you eat.” but have you ever stopped to
think how strange that is? You take a three foot long toasty brown baguette –
the kind that is crunchy hard on the outside and soft in the middle – if you
get hit in the head with that or if someone jabs you in the stomach with one,
it’s gonna hurt. However, you take that
same French-baked baseball bat , cut in half and slather it with butter, or
better yet, Nutella, and it is delightful.
You chew it up and swallow it and it becomes the building blocks of your
manly (or womanly) physique! That’s
crazy! But it’s all this way because
that’s how God designed us!
Our bodies are not the only thing that is automatic. The entire planet works on a schedule which
we do not have to program or think about.
I don’t think I have ever gone to sleep praying, “Lord, please keep us
in orbit. While I sleep, please don’t
forget to keep the world spinning so that we can have the illusion of the sun
coming up in the morning. Please don’t
let us spin off into the cold of deep space or be sucked into the intense heat
of the sun so that we spontaneously burst into flames!.” I’ve never worried about whether or not
gravity will remain constant. The possibility
of it increasing until I cannot walk or I get crushed under my own weight has
never been a real concern. At the same time I have never worried that one day I
might walk out of my house and suddenly just float off into space because
gravity just let go. In a very real,
tangible sort of way, we owe a lot more to God than we ever know.
The psalmist put it simply: “This is the day the Lord has
made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.”
When I think about it this way, I am amazed at all the things which make life possible - things I enjoy every day and never
really even think about . All these things are in place because the
Lord made them to be. In that case this
simple verse form Psalm 118 means more than I used to think it did. The important thing is not that this day or
that day is more important than any other..
It’s that every day I have here is a day that I wake up breathing,
walking, eating and enjoying because God created me and everything I experience with
every part of my being. The profound
truth is that most of what life depends on works so well; by His design, that I fully benefit
from it without ever having to adjust or control it. This is the day THAT THE LORD HAS MADE!
Any day I am breathing is a good day!
Happy
breath day to me – and to you.
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