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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

Breathe, O Breath of God

breathe, o breath of God

Justin began his sermon on Sunday with the question, “When was the last time you felt two emotions at once?” A few weeks ago Stephen was playing hide-n-seek with the kids. It had been a week! Our new puppy sprained her paw, Lucy had run a fever for 24 hours and we were having telehealth visits with doctors to decide if we should test her for COVID, plus getting ready to travel to meet family at the end of the week and lining up logistics for church reopening. The kids couldn’t find Stephen, so I was helping them look. Stephen jumped out of our bedroom closet with a loud “Rawr” and we all genuinely screamed. The screams turned to laughter, the deep belly laugh kind. But, then, while I was laughing so hard I began to cry, my laughter turned to real tears and I sobbed into Stephen’s chest. The emotions and stress I had been holding in all week broke free.

I am an Enneagram 1- The perfectionist. I do well with black & white, the grey areas are really difficult for me. Throughout this season, I can feel God calling me to lean into Him in the grey areas of life. Should we travel? Should we see friends? Should we go back to church? Should we all get tested? I desire to be “right” and the narrative in my head is a constant list of my failures, the things I ought to have done better, and as Justin pointed out, it often leads to emotional death and my inability to let things co-mingle. As I have lived through Quarantine, I have not done well in lamenting the loss and finding beauty in the joy- but instead I live in my fear of failure in both the loss and joy.

“Breathe, O breath of God, breathe”. As Justin casually used this phrase in his sermon, this felt like my deepest prayer. I need the breath of God in my dry bones. I need Him to walk with me in the grey areas. I need Him to help me feel my sorrow and my joy, without guilt, without feeling like I have to bounce back to the other end of the spectrum. I need renewal, but that renewal is going to come through the stripping away.

As life changes, as the stripping away of my security and idols continues, my tendency will be to live in nostalgia. There is so much I miss, so many things I want to be able to do again without fear or anxiety creeping in. But, as Justin pointed out, this season is priming us to long for a future reality. At women’s retreat in March, one of our sessions touched on the story in John 21 where the resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples and he makes them breakfast. A simple scene. But, as we went through the story, I wept in the back of the room, because the sweetness of having breakfast with Jesus filled my heart. Yes, there are things to mourn, real loss, real injustice, real sorrow, but as Christians, it pushes us to long even more for our future home, when people from every tribe, tongue, nation can eat breakfast on the beach with Jesus, without fear of sickness, without tears, forever.

~Bronwyn Siebert