I Just Breathed

It was eleven hours and he can account for almost none of it.

He got there at about four in the afternoon and it was three in the morning when it finished, and in between there is a long stretch that he cannot reconstruct at all, which surprised him, because he has always had a good memory for rooms.

He knows some things. He knows the chair was too low. He knows a nurse came in four times and one of them touched his shoulder on the way out and did not say anything, and he has thought about that more than he expected to.

He knows he held a hand for a long time.

And he knows, and this is the thing, that in eleven hours he did not say one word to God.

Not out loud, obviously. But not inside either. He kept waiting for something to arrive, the way it always has. He is not a man without words. He speaks at things. People ask him to.

And nothing came the whole night.

What he did instead, without deciding to, was breathe. He noticed at some point around midnight that he had matched his own breathing to the breathing in the bed, and that he had been doing it for a while, and he did not stop.

That was in April.

And what he has been carrying since, quietly, without telling his wife or his brother or the man he usually tells things to, is a specific and unshakeable sense that he was given eleven hours and did nothing with them.

That somebody who prays should have prayed. That the one chance he had to cover that room, he sat in it silent, matching his breathing to a dying man like an animal.

And that is you in your own chair with the light going, or you would not still be reading.

What the word for Spirit is, and what that means about breathing

Let me start with the passage and then give you something I think you have never had.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

You know that verse. Let me put a second thing beside it.

The words the Bible uses for the Spirit, in both of its languages, are the ordinary words for breath. The wind in Genesis moving over the water is a breath. When Jesus wants to give the Spirit to those men in a locked room after the resurrection, John does not record a lecture or a laying on of hands. He records this: he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22).

He breathed on them.

You were not doing nothing at midnight. You were doing the one thing the whole Bible uses as its picture of Him. It is written that He breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), and the words for Spirit in Scripture are the words for breath. The Holy Spirit is not a stranger to a room where two men are breathing together and nobody is talking.

Now I want to be careful here, because I am not going to tell you that breathing is a technique or that you accidentally prayed in some clever way. That would be a trick, and you would see through it in about a day.

I am telling you something plainer.

You are not the one who was supposed to cover that room. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), and Himself is the word, which puts the covering on Him. The Holy Spirit was in that room for eleven hours, and He did not arrive because you managed something and He did not leave when you ran out.

And the sentence you have been carrying since April, which is that somebody who prays should have prayed.

Look at what you actually did.

You sat in a low chair for eleven hours. You held a hand. You stayed when a nurse came and went four times. You matched your own breathing, without deciding to, to somebody who was leaving, which is the closest thing a person can do to going partway with them.

You did not waste eleven hours and you were not silent in the way you think. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), and there is no room on earth where that is truer than the one you were in. The Holy Spirit was praying underneath the whole of it, and the not knowing what to say was exactly the condition Paul says He meets.

I am not going to tell you why nothing came. I do not know. Nobody writing anything knows what happens in a man in a room like that, and a page that hands you a reason is guessing at the most serious hours of your life.

You are not required to explain April for it to have been covered. It is written that He who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit (Romans 8:27). The Holy Spirit was understood in that room without one word of it needing to be found by you.