Breathe with Me

Lately I have been thinking that our minds are troubled because we don't keep pace with the universe. Our lives on Earth are short -- 70 or 80 years -- but eternity is long. God lives on an entirely different scale of time; he takes the long view, and we rarely do. But what if we could train ourselves to enter God time, to breathe with him?

A whale's heart beats an average of six beats per minute, and its breaths per minute is about the same. But a hummingbird's heart beats over 1200 times per minute, and in that time it takes 250 breaths. I think we are a lot like hummingbirds.

Toward the end of the movie Signs, a young boy is having an asthma attack, but he is unable to get to his inhaler, because he and his family are stuck down in the basement of their house while terrifying aliens wander around upstairs. Eventually the father is able to help his son through the asthma attack by holding him and saying, "Breathe with me."

When we are freaking out, worrying that things will never turn out, sometimes I think we need to stop and breathe with God. By reminding ourselves that circumstances don't have to meet our demands and life doesn't have to go at the pace we think it should, we can enter God time. All our fretting and frantic demands won't change anything. Listening for God's slow, deep heartbeat can remind us that he loves us. And breathing with him can remind us to slow down, to recognize our frenetic pace, to trust that God is working things out just as he has promised he would. He breathes more slowly than you and me. We want fast but he works slow. When we learn to breathe with him, we can live in peace.