I Can Breathe Again

I Can Breathe Again

1/6/19

How difficult would you think it is to allow yourself to become run down as time slips passed us?  This is a question we all must ask ourselves and usually does not physically present itself until some major catastrophe occurs that brings us to this attention.  If the physical can become in such a condition what makes us believe that our spiritual lives cannot reach the same condition, a condition that while least remembered has the longer-lasting consequences than the physical alone.  God has given us an eternal outline and plan book of how to escape this terrible outcome, but during the game of life, we tend to choose to run our own plays instead.  One cannot help but look at the tragedies that are occurring each day yet we fail to recognize that these atrocities against humanity shall continue and increase until we turn back to God and once again live under His Ways, a holy mark that will do our spiritual lungs a much-needed breath of fresh air.

As I have previously mentioned over the years’ writings, my genetic makeup is not of the best stock and that it seems like as time goes along my health issues slightly increase each year and I have to find another way to combat this rising cost of living.  So, given this unknown information way back when and when I was a young man was offered cigarettes I was wise in not electing to accept them for it would have only increased my advancement of cardiac and circulatory issues.  However, the things I did do to my body when I was younger did manage to prove the doctors correct and while I am thankfully hanging around today, I am reminded of my decisions way back during my youth each morning when I rise out of bed.  Yes, they do hurt and while I am not claiming them over my life I cannot ignore their presence for sometimes their company takes my breath away.  So, it is in my best interest and advice to myself to adhere to everything I can in order to make my body perform as it should for as long as possible and to reject those items that would do harm to me while this incredible journey of mine continues.  But how many times a week do I ignore this truth and intake or partake of rituals that present such harmful items into my life, if known that number would be staggering which is why it is vitally important to me that I do my best at all times to recognize such wicked items and to keep them from my life.

I remember when I was in high school the big environmental issue was how all of the cities around the world were in danger of becoming endemic of lung diseases due to the amount of pollution in their local air zones.  It seemed like each night provided more people on the news verbally abusing the local, state, and federal governments demanding that these places of pollution creators be shut down but as they screamed and yelled they provided no viable alternative to rid us of this ugliness.  This was and still is a huge concern but one does not hear too much anymore about the air pollution that hangs over the major cities of the world today, for we have moved on down the line and are doing our best to tackle another issue that many have deemed more important.  Overall, there are not too many people around that would say that environmental issues do not need to be cleaned up and most of us understand that this task is one that will not come about easily either.  Differing opinions on which area should be worked on first, which issue should take the higher priority, and we surely cannot forget which politician will benefit from such idiotic accreditation speeches afterward.  It is for this last mentioned setting that shall prove that no major cleanup shall occur for our personal gains and attitudes have overridden any hope of getting anything done together resulting in a corrupted physical state that will only become worse as each month passes.  I am not an environmentalist by any means, but I do see the issues at hand and these issues need to be addressed on all levels.

But there is another issue that needs to be addressed first and foremost and that is the spiritual environmental condition of our lives and it is this issue that God wants to speak to us today for it is a condition that we are allowing to continue that is literally sucking the life out of our eternity and placing us in a dire situation when it comes to spiritual life.  The Church fails to recognize that when we allow the world into the walls of our heart that those conditions will keep in line with their advancement, not slowing down but increasing in strength and power choking out the life that God has given us way back in Genesis 2:7.  Many pass over this verse and focus on what follows Adam’s creation, but we need to understand just how important air is to our lives and how our bodies depend on quality and quantity of supply in order to operate efficiently and satisfactory.  God cannot complete anything in a haphazard manner or to give out only half of an effort He must operate in a complete and holy manner at all times so when He gave His breath of life into Adam it was of good quality and the necessary amount for Adam to take over and to function accordingly.  Adam was never meant to know and to feel pain or any type of malfunction of his existence but to maintain a healthy and pure flow at all times but as time passed this mechanism of purity began to have doubts that would eventually lead to his downfall and take with him the entire landscape of living.

While we believe that we are working on all cylinders, our bodies are actually working overtime just to keep up with our daily demands of stability resulting in the fact that our output has decreased tremendously because the majority of our energy is spent on trying to keep us functioning instead of providing the energy to those who need God.  When we look back at how we were created, we cannot help but notice that God’s breath was pure and holy that was placed into our lives by Him this means that on all levels understood and felt complete perfection while delivering upon the command that God gave.  Part of the dominion that God gave to us was to keep and dress the Garden this was the command to Adam, which means that if God gave Adam this task then He had to have given him the physical ability to complete this task as well and NOT a limited supply or damaged goods.  This breath of life that God breathed into our lives serves both the physical and the eternal and is not limited to just one aspect of life.

How would we know when God has been allowed back into our lives and hearts?  When I had my first stent put in I was talking a walk during the middle of the night and I suddenly stopped in the middle of the hallway.  The nurse who was assisting me on this first walk asked if everything was okay and I did not say anything but took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  The amount of air my lungs received was incredible and it was at that moment that I realized just how deprived of air I had been previous to this procedure.  A new feeling that I had over time lost sensation of and over this period of time learned how to adjust my body enough to believe my body had adequately adjusted properly.  I ignored the first real symptoms of this loss of air believing that at some point, maybe tomorrow, that I would take the correct role in order to keep my air flow intact.  Years later a second warning was given and with the second chance thwarted God gave me a third for some reason.  Recently, my genetic toil caught up with me and I found myself with vessels from my leg and chest in new positions around my heart.  This time God showed me a sliced onion with a black dot in the middle and said it was my choice to allow the blackness to grow or not and while I was learning to live again speak and share with others that this is the condition of their hearts as well, not only physical but mainly and more importantly spiritual.  And we all know that if a heart is not functioning correctly the production of clean and solid airflow cannot be delivered on a normal basis and it is at this point that this nation along with many other nations is at.

What I failed to recognize is that even though I had a plan for my recovery, I fell short in its delivery and needed someone whose expertise could change my situation and place it back in line with the path that I needed to be on.  The path that I had chosen disallowed me to be vital to the world but a dependent on my vital signs for survival.  We have never been intended to survive on our own systems but to seek God for our needs, which in turn, give us the ability to keep and dress our dominion properly.  A while back, God used the illustration about how our eyes have become clouded and veered off focus as an example that our ways have moved away from His perfect path for our lives.  God is now working on showing us other parts of our bodies that need to be cleaned up and purified so that we can dutifully perform what we were created to complete.  Our lungs control the energy and nutrients that are supplied to our bodies so we can do the work necessary that lies before us each day, but just as we have allowed pettiness to creep into our daily routines so have we allowed the world to infiltrate the airways of our lungs to produce a less effective source of provisions for our lives.  With the schedules that we deem necessary each day, it is easy to forget that unless we continually seek after God through His Word the world shall take advantage of this lack of truth and spill into our lives by way of the legal state.  God shall be relentless in this type of demonstrations and examples for He understands what the world is presenting and He wants His children to know how to combat the ways of the world.

I cannot count the number of times a smoker has stated that they need to go out and smoke a cigarette in order to clear their lungs.  These wonderful people know what they are doing to their bodies yet still believe in such a lie about how it “clears” their lungs to bring harmful chemicals into their existence.  We do so many unjust things to our physical bodies that it is almost incomprehensible, so just imagine what we are allowing into our spiritual lives on that level especially when the majority of people do not even believe that we have a spiritual aspect of our lives.  What is it going to take for us to realize the harm that we are doing to our eternal instincts by allowing such spiritual garbage to be thrown into our hearts, will it take us being stripped layer by layer until something drastic occurs? 

I pray that the Church wakes up from her spiritual slumber and takes notice of what is occurring in her neighborhood.  This sickness and spiritual strain on circulation coincide with the physical condition of the Church for both go hand in hand.  Once my physical attributes began to show themselves, it was time for me to take notice of my spiritual aspects as well to which I found was deep in controversy with God.  I could not believe just how far down and drug down I had allowed myself to become spiritually it was sadly enlightening to my heart when this revelation occurred and while I was not yet writing my story was coming together just as God had planned it out so long before I took my first breath.  God understood where my heart was at and where he is at today and even though I would have loved to have told people what God was saying fifteen years ago when this cardiac process of mine started, He was not ready to show me because He saw the condition of my spiritual heart and it needed a bit more work still.

Church, if we do not wake up and begin to serve God as we have been commanded our spiritual existence shall be overrun and our physical presence on the earth shall be no more; how is this known, through the words of Revelation Chapter 3.  We have handed so much of our authority over to the world and what is so sad is that we fail to recognize that this authority that we have turned over is actually the breath that Jesus gave to us when He gave the command to go into the world and preach the gospel.  We have accumulated so much worldly smoke (acceptance) into our lives that we no longer can decipher which information is good and which is bad, fulfilling the curse of worldly progression that Genesis 3:7 initiated.  Let us stop our heart and lung disease and allow the Great Physician to prescribe the accurate remedy for our condition.  I guarantee that when we do, we will stop for a moment and take in a deep breath of clean and holy air into our spiritual lungs and feel how God intended for our lives to be lived.  We do not have to wait until heaven to find out this freshness of clean and holy air.  If the truth is known, if we wait until we get into heaven to find this breathing scope it is also a guarantee that we will not know this truth because we did not fulfill our command on earth before our calling home.

Repent Church and allow God to fill us with His breath of life again so that we can keep and maintain the job that Jesus commanded us to do.  The world cannot give us the air and nutrients to function that our body requires so let us stop the intake and partaking of such dreaded worldly pollution and allow God to change our lives from the inside out.  The adaptations that the world is offering highly concludes with the destruction of your existence so it is imperative that we stop colluding with this death process and function as we are supposed to, for the command of Jesus to His Church is our air and our source of breathing and it is time to stand up with this new lung capacity of ours and say to the world I can breathe again.

DLB