Saturday, March 12, 2022
All Things Living
Breathe
As God Breathes in and through Them
Psalm 33:6
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
Acts 17:25
Nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
Words of Grace For Today
Poor Delilah. A middle child and ignored by her parents before and after her mother drover her father to kill himself, she came to worse and worse experiences, though she could barely measure them.
Her step-father, honest and kind, was her refuge for a few short years before everything began to fall apart around her.
Manipulated by her older sister and mother, she was driven to report the sexual contact her mother had with her. But she lied. She told teachers, friends, and eventually police that it was her step-father. When the police pursued him, recruiting and creating more and more lies about her step-father she was lost, so lost. When her older sister and mother paid more and more attention to her, when the school councillors spent more and more time with her to help her through her abuse, and when the prosecutor against her step-father paid more and more attention to her, she finally felt she was someone, someone important enough to be noticed and cared about. It did not compute for her as she watched the courts send her loving step-father to jail for crimes he did not commit, based on the lies told by her mother and herself. She had trouble sleeping. The counsellor at school, and the therapist paid for by her mother spent more time with her. Her mother, with her millions, rewarded her with a brand new iPhone, and then a new MacBook, and new clothes and all the cosmetics she wanted.
Yet the breath she had spent to lie could not be taken back, could not be inhaled, could not ever be denied in her heart of hearts. And her breath became short, her mind frazzled out on her more often than not, and her body grew as she tried to fill the emptiness at her core with food.
Breath, once wasted on lies, especially lies that destroy other people, never is found again, until God forgives, one accepts the forgiveness and confesses one’s terrible sins.
God, the one who spoke a word to create the universe, whose breath created all living things, who needs nothing of service from humans … though God craves people to love, to love one another, and to love God … this God does not leave any of us without forgiveness, unconditional love and God’s full attention. God offered this to Delilah, as God offers this to each of us.
With a word, a word of truth, God renewed Delilah, and Delilah set the record straight, though too late for her step-father, who died in poverty, it set the record straight and exposed the police, the lawyers, and the courts who used her lies and so many other people’s lies to destroy people, almost as a past-time. For the amount of destruction Putin barely registers in comparision.
So God breathes … for each of us, for each of the Ukrainians and Russians, and all the others met by Putin’s unjust, cruel invasions, and for each person destroyed by a word that is a lie, breathed which spreads and corrupts the basis of life.
So God breathes … and so we live, as a gift, undeserved and abundantly blessed.
So we breathe so that others may live, making our words count.