Just Breathe

Heavenly Father,

You have me very still—you almost have me immobilized, yet still I struggle like an infant who fights sleep. I wrestle with the tangled workings of my mind. I long to be a baby pressed securely to her mother’s bosom. I need to be swaddled.

I asked that you would get me still enough to hear your breathing. I asked that you synchronize my inhalations and exhalations with yours. I asked and You answered.

And yet inwardly I know there is still a tension of resistance. There is still this attitude of striving. I still battle this ever-present grasp of self-induced perfection.

Oh God! Enable me to listen. You are trying to talk to me, to instruct me, to console me. You are whispering and rubbing my cheek to induce much needed sleep, but I have this endless, inward prattle that both interrupts and interferes. My inner dialogue is furied and incessant. I am having trouble hearing you above it.

I have been asking you for years to help me to just breathe. I don’t know how. Every time I take a breath I fill it with so many other things. Things that I think others want or expect. Things that I want or expect—and they become this monotonous litany of disappointments and half failures.

I want to breathe. Just breathe.

I have been asking this silent prayer for years. Years.

Even today please help me to slow the prattle.

Oh God, help me to exhale so that I might inhale. I have been holding my breath too long. This air is stale.

Amen

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