Bearing His Breath

Bearing His Breath

Imagine, one minute you are walking along going about your skillfully choreographed life, and bam, the next you are dangling upside down by your ankles without recourse or a safety net.

Saint Paul understands completely because the same phenomenon seized and shook him to his core over two thousand years ago while journeying to Damascus.

This blindsiding event, both terrifying and fierce, immediately rendered him sightless and transformed him from a Christian persecutor and annihilator to Jesus' devoted Apostle replete with receiving the Holy Spirit (Acts 9:1-22).

Life changing stuff.

God's hand was dramatic, pivotal, and effective in an instant causing Paul's surrender to forces greater than he could fathom or reconcile.

The Bible is inundated with stories of human conversion, planned and yearned for and unexpected and cataclysmically dizzying, often analogous to tough love by a parent to sway the naysaying or offending child to see the light.

Harsh?

Maybe, in the moment, but if Divine transformation is the goal, an admirable outcome will follow with the intended person a witness to God's awesome works.

Ancient Biblical verses support relinquishing possessions and squelching human desires as a means of purification, humility, and clarity for the person to realize that it is not the abstained and renounced he or she longs for but rather God Himself, who provides everything simply by His sanctifying Breath and command.

This not so apparent maneuver permits the individual to surmise and conclude what is important.

His Holy Breath within us is a life-giving gift that can clear cluttered and tainted space with each inhalation, making room for the Lord's specific fruitive seeds to bloom even in the darkest or most perilous environments.

Thankfully, conversion does not have to be earth-shattering or isolating.

It is a sacred internal private process of refocusing, surrendering, releasing, and expanding.

With this newfound expansion, we understand that it is not about deprivation but rather receiving, and we are able to accept what the Lord is waiting to bestow upon us, substantiating that the gains will outweigh the losses.

We are midway through Lent.

Your conversion may not be as profound and life-altering as Saint Paul's, but it will suffice a change of heart and reorienting with a revised perspective and perhaps a radical epiphany.

Ascetically, there will be a repurposing: you, only better.

Your spiritual shift is the empowerment necessary to remediate and redeem our aching world immobilized by insurmountable divisiveness, rampant polarization, and hostile biases.

Parents hope to bestow all goodness upon their children, and since God is our Father the same is true.

What does God want to give you?

This season of conversion let us joyfully recollect that all the Disciples were converted from one way of being to another with Jesus' call.

Bearing His breath confers fulfillment of His word, which is the whole point of mortal incarnation.

By fulfilling the Lord's requests, we are filled and overflowing, always.

~ "Rend your heart, and not your garments, and return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in love," Joel 2:13 ~
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