“Be still and know that I am God.” ~ Psalm 46:10
“When your heart gets restless, turn to worship. When the interior atmosphere settles, return to listening.” ~ Graham Cooke
“Blog” has become a household word in recent decades. It was originally an abbreviation for web log, which is more or less what a blog really is; a log that has been published on the Internet.
Not the Ren and Stimpy kind of log, mind you, but the kind of log that Captain Picard would record his voice notes in. So, basically a diary, except it doesn’t sound very masculine for the captain of a Federation starship to say “Dear diary” so he says “Captain’s log” instead, which makes it a log, and not anything else. (Certainly not a diary.)
Breathing Jesus is intended to be a log of what it looks like for a person to deliberately engage in life on Earth as a human being who has chosen to embark upon the adventure of becoming friends with the God who made them.
It is unavoidably necessary that we must spend a lot of time with someone if we desire to know them well. It is no different with God. This was made very difficult for me by the fact that God is an invisible deity Whose very existence my propensity for analytical thought has led me often to question, and whose primary mode of indelible communicative effort is represented in a collection of ancient writings (the Bible) put together by human beings — a concept with which this selfsame propensity has caused me severe internal wrestlings.
These difficulties have been intensified in that I have also struggled all my life with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It is a condition that is perhaps over-diagnosed, and trivialized in popular culture, but I can assure you it is a real problem. It’s like scouring a book with a highlighting marker, intending to mark only the important bits, but somehow being made (by some terribly annoying force) to involuntarily highlight the whole entire thing. The best description of ADHD I ever read likened the condition to existing perpetually “in a soft rain of Post-It notes,” trying to decide which things are important, and which things should have more attention paid to them, but being unable to do so because of the fact that everything seems to have been already marked as important.
For me, writing things down has become the tool that I use to focus my prayers when my thoughts are too scattered (which is basically always, it seems.) I’ve been keeping prayer journals on paper, in Microsoft Word, and on Google Docs for some time now, and I wanted to create a blog that I could use to do this publicly from time to time, because…well, because I felt like it would be cool.
Now, as I write this, I bring these problems to You, Jesus, as they are simply way too much for me to be able to overcome on my own. These are facets of my own self, which is all that I have every really known…but you know my self better than even I do, Jesus. You are the one who thought me up.
I am thankful and happy that You made me to be intelligent, and to instinctively seek answers and explanations, and I desire that greater faith and deeper trust in You would operate firmly and effectively alongside these traits, and not in spite of them.
I choose to praise You here and now, because You are good.
I feel like the concept that God is good has become so ingrained in our speech patterns that it loses its actual meaning, almost. Like when you say a word over and over so many times that your brain loses track of its actual meaning, and starts hearing only the sounds themselves.
You are good, though, and you are so good. Like, in the way when someone pauses and says, “Wow…man, that’s good.” (Except, like, times a billion. Basically.)
You are good even when there are problems. You are good even when these problems cause me pain. Your goodness remains a constant factor in the equation, no matter what forces happen to be working overtime to bring ruin and decay. Help me to have the right perspective about this stuff. Help me to not give voice to the enemy and the accuser, but to instead give voice to Your Spirit, the artistic medium through which all of this goodness has been expressed throughout time. Help me to — as much as possible — see things as they truly are, and not through the lens of my prejudices…
And so on.