Silent. Everything was silent…
Our daughter had just been born.
The room was quiet….
Very, very quiet…
I looked at my wife…
Aren’t newborn babies supposed to cry?
Then suddenly she took her first gulp of air.
She breathed in…
And cried.
Emptying her lungs to take in the next breath, she breathed out….
And cried.
I smiled and laughed… and probably cried a little bit myself…
As one breath after another, our daughter began her life.
We don’t think about breathing…
Except when it’s a first breath…
A last breath…
A breath taken with effort because of disease…
Breathing, doctors tell us, is one of those functions controlled by the autonomic nervous system so that it happens without our conscious thought…
That’s a good thing…
Because otherwise we’d mess it up.
“If oxygen is good”, we’d think, “I’ll just keep breathing it in. Why bother with breathing out?”
When she was about five, our daughter got very mad at us.
“I’ll hold my breath!” she said.
She took a deep breath, and held it and held it and held it…
Until she had to breathe out to make room for the next gulp of oxygen…
Is accepting God’s grace is a little bit like breathing?
We’re tempted to say, “Thanks for the grace, God! Thanks for your love. I’ll just keep it for myself.”
But God says, “Breathe it out… share it with the world around you.”
Whose model should we follow to sustain a constant inward and outward flow of grace?
In his book Soul Keeping, John Ortberg writes that Jesus…
Lived in a divine rhythm where grace was constantly flowing into him and out from him ~ John Ortberg ~ Soul Keeping -page 127
How do we let grace flow from our souls to those around us?
It was Jesus Himself who answered that question…
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. John 13:34
When we share that love, he said, people will see not just us, but the One whom we follow…
“By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:35
