Learning to breathe: how do I slow down?

If we’re from a time-oriented culture like the United States, slowing down is a huge struggle. How do we do it? The answer is simple: focus on being instead of doing.

All my life, I focused on the things that I did. I identified myself by a long string of activities and accomplishments: student, artist, teacher, actor, writer, etc. But do titles like these really tell people who we are? Not really.

Yet because I had measured my life by my accomplishments, it was very easy to feel like a failure if I didn’t measure up to my standards—or what I believed to be God’s standards.

All of that changed when God shattered my old identity and gave me a new one. No longer was everything hinged on earning anyone’s good opinion. No longer did I have to strive to create my own identity. I already had an identity, bought and paid for! I just needed to live it out.

This was easier said than done, but breaking a finger certainly helped. I was forced to slow down, to listen, and to take long walks in the woods because that was the only exercise I was allowed.

Then God told me to go to Florida for part of the following summer. A halfway house was opening up for women, and we were told that teachers were needed to help women learn basic life skills. I cheerfully volunteered to go, and after I had scraped together some money by painting fences, my friend Mary and I hopped into my parents’ silver Nissan Versa and made the long trek to the Sunshine State.

Things didn’t pan out quite like we expected. We went to do great things for God, but when we arrived, only one woman was at the halfway house and no teachers were needed. I did secretary work for a Recovery group, and we cleaned and painted around the church property where we were staying. But really, there wasn’t any great work for us to do. 

So for five weeks, I put on my brakes and focused on being.

The therapy of being

After living out of “doing” for so long, hanging out in Florida was like going through physical therapy. I practiced the therapy of being.

If you’ve ever gone through physical therapy, you know that it isn’t just a relaxing massage. Every week, my physical therapist unwrapped my swollen finger and told me to bend it as far as it would go. With painful slowness, I stretched my stiff finger and bid it to bend, and my therapist would cheer me on and measure my efforts every week—one millimeter at a time. When I started squeezing sponges, I felt prouder than a heavyweight champion.

My physical therapist also poked and squeezed my finger sometimes.

“Does that hurt?” he asked.

“Nah, not really.”

“You must have a high pain tolerance. Most people would be kicking me in the shins right now.”

Huh. For some reason, that didn’t surprise me. I had trained myself not to feel much of anything for a long time. Maybe there was a reason I couldn’t cry in testimonies like other girls could.

My physical therapist would also wrap my finger into a bent position and leave me like that for awhile.

That was what Florida was like: sitting curled tightly into the position of being, without the ability to do anything else.

It was exactly what I needed.

And as I showed up to the tiny church every Sunday in the stifling, deserted months of August, people seemed to be happy that I was just there. And I realized that sometimes just being can be a blessing to others. The greatest gift we can give to somebody is the gift of ourselves.

Of course we still did things in Florida. We . . .

• visited lots of people 
• played tennis
• searched for gators 
• read books 
• raided Krispy Kreme donuts 
• found thrift stores 
• welcomed in a sunset on the beach with guitars. 

Each activity was like an adventure as I stretched my fragile fingers and practiced some independence without a lot of people looking over my shoulder.

But mostly, I settled in to relax and listen. God spoke to me a lot through the book of Galatians. It’s a book that resonates with freedom.

Healed to help others

I went to Florida partly because I needed space from my home environment and the Bible school campus where I lived. On my way down, I asked God to put the people on my heart that He wanted there. But as I stretched my limbs a thousand miles away, God put the Bible school students back at home on my heart once again.

So when my dad asked me if I would consider returning to the Bible school to fill the recently vacated position of “dorm mom,” I prayed about it seriously. At first, I wasn’t sure it was wise. The past ten months had taught me one thing about myself:

I was broken.

How could a broken person minister to anybody else?

But then I read this footnote on Mark 9:30-37 in my Recovery Bible:

“God heals our hurts so we can help others get the healing they need, not so we can rise to a higher position in society. If we fail to help needy people, we are pushing Jesus right out of our life.”

God doesn't wait for us to be perfect  and whole people before He is ready to use us.

I knew then that God wanted me to be the next dorm mom.

The girls in my dorm

And so I returned.

That school year was good. It was hard sometimes, but it was very good. As I struggled to do college on-line and love the six girls God had placed in my life, I kept up the practice of being. I couldn’t be and do everything that the dorm mom before me had done, so I learned to be who I was instead.

The freedom of being

My newfound freedom in being started changing a myriad of other aspects of my life. I had beaten myself up for so long whenever I didn’t behave a certain way, so I started varying my habits: I brushed my teeth when I felt like it, I went to bed when I felt like it, I got up at a different time every morning, I read my Bible as much or as little as I wanted, and sometimes I went to prayer meeting and purposefully didn’t pray out loud just so I could leave under the full knowledge that God loved me anyway.

His love wasn’t nearly as conditional as I had been treating it.

Not that discipline and good habits aren’t important. They are. But self-discipline should never be the driving force of our lives because it places more emphasis on self and less emphasis on the Spirit. Living out Christ’s life in our new identity means living by His Spirit’s guidance, not our own willpower. 

As I learned this, God again used my friend Mariah to teach me. If there is anyone who knows how to slow down and enjoy the Life that Jesus has given, it’s her. So I slowed down and practiced breathing.

And being.

I will close with Galatians 2:19-21 from Eugene Peterson’s The Message Bible. It sums up a significant part of my life:

"What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a 'law man' so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not 'mine,' but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily."

Let’s not only wake to the Life that Jesus died to bring. Let’s allow it to course through our veins. Let’s breathe in the oxygen of Love and learn how to be who He made us to be.

We can only enjoy the Life Jesus gave if we slow down enough to be.