Breathe!!!

Have you noticed that not being able to breathe stirs up panic feelings in us? I’m a lifelong asthmatic and I know what it feels like not to breathe.  It’s scary.  It can create a lot of anxiety.  But the worst and most frantic time I remember was the swim meet my Senior year of academy. 

I was entered in the long-distance race.  The year before, since no one else had signed up for it, I had volunteered and much to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I had won it by almost a pool length.   So this year, I was favored to win.  It was 4 laps or 8 lengths of the pool.  The whistle blew and we all dove in.  I took the lead very early, and continued to hold the lead through the first three laps.  I made the turn to start my last lap and pushed off of the wall, and was over halfway down the pool,  when suddenly my whole body seized up.  Just froze in mid-stroke.  One arm was locked above my head and the other was down at my waist and nothing would move.  I remember looking up at my classmates lining the pool and hearing them scream, “Swim.  Swim!” 

But I couldn’t move.  And then, I began to sink.  I couldn’t even breathe in or scream out.  Just quietly began to sink with my muscles rigid and locked.  I remember my feet going down, then my head just silently slipping under the water.  My eyes wouldn’t even close as the pool water stung them.  I felt myself going farther and farther down in the deep end of the pool and could do absolutely nothing to help myself. I felt both anxious and overwhelmed.  I desperately wanted to breathe, but could not get back to the surface to save my own life.

Finally, after what seem like minutes, though I’m sure it was only seconds, one of my classmates dove in, came to the bottom and pulled me up to the surface.  As I broke the surface, my lungs inhaled sharply and it broke the muscle spasm which had gripped my whole body.  They pulled me out of the pool, and I just lay there on the sidewalk and gasped for air.  Let me tell you, not breathing creates a lot of anxiety.

We talk a lot about our need for prayer, about how good prayer is, about how necessary it is to our spiritual walk, yet we seldom seem to take the time to pray.  It has been said that prayer is the breath of the soul.  If this is so, then perhaps the reason we so often feel anxious or overwhelmed in life is because we are not breathing! 

In order to do away with the anxiety and panic in our lives, we must allow our souls to breathe deeply.  And one of the primary reasons we are not breathing deeply enough is because we are not still long enough to do so.  “Be still”, God says.  Being still is the first requisite to breathing well. 

When difficulties come; breathe.  When it feels like life is going to run you over; breathe.  When you feel uncertain or scared or anxious; breathe.

Ellen White, in her book Desire of Ages, page 667, says,  “The path of sincerity and integrity is not a path free from obstruction, but in every difficulty we are to see a call to prayer. There is no one living who has any power that he has not received from God, and the source whence it comes is open to the weakest human being. {DA 667.4}