10-26-2020
Happy birthday! We’ve been waiting a whole year for another one. We made a list of gift ideas and hope that someone will bless us with one of those valued items. Breakfast includes birthday milk, a family tradition of a cup of chocolate milk with icing and sprinkles around the rim. Later in the day, we get to the good stuff. It’s finally time to sit down with the family at our dining room table in front of some balloons. Someone brings in a yummy dessert and we find a lighter to ignite the candles (I won’t say how many). We sing the birthday song loud and off-key, but it’s ok because we’re just trying to have fun. Then we eat and open the presents.
Repeat that scene.
Repeat again.
Repeat one more time!
This is how our family celebrates in October. We have four birthdays within 9 days. Each person gets their own presents, special dessert, and lots of balloons. A few of the balloons are filled with helium to float on our ceiling for a couple weeks. The majority of balloons are filled with the breath from my lungs.
I reach into the bag and grab another color. I put the end of the balloon in my mouth and I take a deep breath. Next, I blow out as hard as I can to get that balloon bigger and bigger. Eventually, I decide the balloon is a good size...between being too big and going to pop and being too small and weird looking. I close the end of the balloon by tying a knot, then I whack it and watch it drift across the room.
As I’m sitting here, running out of air from inflating billions of balloons, I’m taken back to the first human and the life breath that filled him. God breathed life into Adam when he created him and then placed him in the garden of Eden. Humans of every generation echo that moment when we enter this world. On our day of birth, we inhale our first breath on earth as a newborn baby.
The very sound of breathing is God’s name, Yhwh. Go ahead and try it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Listen. Breathe in "Yh" and out "wh." I like to think of it as our bodies constantly praising God by softly speaking His holy name. It's God's glory coming out with each breath we take. God literally designed us to worship by being alive.
I looked up the meaning of God's name, Yahweh, and I found it means "He who makes that which has been made." So, this name of God speaks to Creator God and also sounds like the moment when God created man.
How is God so deep and complex yet simple at the same time? He gave Adam life with his breath, humans must breathe continually to survive, His name is the sound of breathing, and that same name talks about creation when he gave Adam his first breath. Wow! Every second of our lives reflect God and His creation, but it’s so easy that our minds don’t even think about it because our bodies do it on their own. I don’t have to tell my lungs to fill up or my nose to suck in some air (unless I’m congested...thank you, common cold), it just happens.
I wonder if Matt Maher knew all this when he sang "Alive and Breathing." Part of the lyrics go like this “Joy still comes in the morning. Hope still walks with the hurting. If you’re alive and breathing, Praise the Lord!”
I had a rough summer, and I heard this song a lot. I’m glad it’s been brought back to my mind this fall as a reminder to worship the God who is always with me. When I doubt that God is near, I need only to breathe to remember He is in every moment of my life.
Genesis 2:7 “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
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