I was watching my grandfather sleep. Breathing is more like work for him right now and every breath is deliberate and intentional. His chest shakes while it fills with air and then almost caves in on itself as he pushes it out. It doesn't seem like sleeping. He doesn't look restful. Even now, in a room down the hall, I can hear the interruptions occasionally: a cough to clear the fluid in his throat and a gasp to fall back into the rhythm.

It stirs up these images in my head of Eden, and God breathing into a ball of clay; the eternal and infinite God putting a piece of himself, putting life, into something so finite and temporary. For me, something in our breathing does seem holy - maybe because it points back to that first breath - breathing in God, maybe simply because it is what keeps us physically alive, maybe just because I need it—whether I understand it and all of its science or not.

For some reason there is also an image in my head of God in that room with his arms wrapped around my grandfather in love, coaching each breath in and out of his lungs and keeping him alive, bringing peace to the chaos that breathing has become for him.  It's this loving, divine sort of CPR - and the longer I sit with that image, I don't know if it is too far from reality.

There is this incredible passage of scripture when Paul is speaking to the people of Athens where he says:

"
The God who made the world and everything it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.

Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being' as some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.'"

That is incredible.  There is something deeply intimate in that.  God created every man and every nation of mankind, in the hope that they would find him, feel their way back to him.  He positioned all of us in a place that would lead us to do that, and he positioned himself "not far from each one of us," - so close, in fact, that "in him we live and move and have our being."

So, essentially, the God of the universe is not playing hide and seek.  He is directing history and all of the world's boundaries in a way that people's eyes would be opened to the fact that he is right there wrapped around them - maybe even in this loving, divine sort of CPR embrace - giving them life and breath and being.

This is what our life and breath is for: seeking God, finding out that he is right here with us trying to bring us back to him and back to life, then using the rest of our breaths in a way that would open people's eyes to the great God who is intimately wrapped up in their lives and waiting for them to see him.

I just heard my grandfather let out another heavy breath. I pray that I will live my life for this purpose until my breaths do not come easy.