Learning How To Breathe
Devastated. You can't sleep. You force yourself to eat, but everything tastes like sawdust and you're still losing weight, or gaining it. Your world has caved in around you and you don't know how you could possibly claw your way out of the ruins that are left.
But worse than all of these things is the simple fact that you can’t breathe. The wreckage of your shattered heart has left you gasping for air, but no matter how much you try to rake oxygen into your dry, barren lungs, it always seems to stop short and you just. can't. breathe.
Your friends understand, but they don't. They hurt with you, but they have no idea what that lack of air is doing to you. Encouraging words fall on deaf ears and you are lost and you are suffocating.
Heart break and grief have a funny way of destroying your ability to function at even the most basic tasks. The loss of a loved one, the ending of a relationship, or losing the hope of your dream coming true. When your dreams, plans, and hopes fall down around you despite your best efforts to hold them up it's not a daily struggle. It's every ounce of strength to get through the next hour, the next minute, the next second. Because 15 ticks of the hand without air is hard, but not now knowing when your breath will come back, thinking it is gone forever? That's almost too much to bear.
When my relationship ended and I saw all my dreams disappear with that man, I lost my breath. And it took a long time to get it back. For months, and I do mean months, I felt like I was barely holding myself together. Every second of every day was an excruciating practice of keeping too many fragments glued together, a sorry Elmer's poster child. And despite my best efforts, I knew everyone could see that I was built of shattered pieces.
That failure to breathe was not just figurative for me. There were times when memories would crash mercilessly into me and leave me literally gasping for air, sobbing out oxygen I did not have. I didn't think I could ever get myself out of that level of despair.
And here's the thing. I couldn't. On my own, I had to resign myself to that devastation because I didn't have the strength to pull myself out and I never would.
But we are not alone. Never alone. I didn't have the strength to get out, but God had the strength to pull me out. Slowly, imperceptibly, He breathed air back into my lungs, life back into my body. I couldn't see it. I didn't know it was happening. But one day I woke up and it was a little easier to breathe. Not an overwhelming difference. Not a complete healing. Just a simple intake of oxygen and a sigh of small relief. But even then, I did not see. Yet God kept breathing. Moving my chest up and down, air in and out. I don't know when I realized it. There was no defining moment. But as I look back now, three years after the fact, I can say that breathing comes naturally again.
For a long, long time, there were still days that it was hard. That those memories relentlessly and hungrily pulled that air from my lungs faster than I could replenish it, but those days slowly became moments, and those moments slowly became seconds.
I don't know where you are, if you are breathing fine, or suffocating, or suffering intermittent losses of breath, but there's a couple of things I want to say to all of you.
First, as always, you are not alone. There are many of us out there. Those who have loved deeply, or hoped deeply, and had those dreams taken away by the fallenness of this world or the divine sovereignty of a God with a better plan. We are out there, and we know. Don't suffer this alone. Reach out and let others walk with you through this.
Second, God is with you. He is the author of breath (Isaiah 42:5; Genesis 2:7; Job 33:4) and he is forcing air into your dry lungs, even when you can't feel or see it. He's sustaining you. And you may not see it for a long time. You may not ever see it on this side of glory, but you can trust it. And one day... tomorrow, a year from now, ten years from now... you'll wake up and realized you learned how to breathe again.
“He is close to the broken-hearted, and he saves those who are crushed in spirit.” -Psalms 34:!8