Breathing is Good

May 23, 2018May 23, 2018 ~ Paul Phillips ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot recently. Sitting in the comfortable old upholstered chair by the front window, I’ve leaned back, lost in the wonder and peril, and the hours have flown before I knew it.

I realized something the other night while reading, though. I’ve talked about it with the Lovely Lady and she’s not sure she agrees, but since she doesn’t disagree, I could be right.

I could be. Perhaps.

The world outside my window is a living, breathing organism. And somehow, we can choke it to death or lend it our breath.

Stick with me now.

What happened is this: Often, I don’t listen well when reading (just ask her about that), but I gradually became aware of the sound. As first, I thought someone in the next room was breathing rather loudly, but as I stopped to listen, it became clear. The world outside was actually breathing! It sounded like an asthmatic old man, but it was breathing.

Heee. Hooo.

Well, I said it became clear, but it wasn’t long before I realized the sound I was hearing was actually the tree frogs in the trees around our house. A chorus would start nearby—Heee—and the chorus up the road a bit would answer, the distance separating them making it seem as if there was a different pitch—Hooo.

Inhale, exhale.

The world is breathing.

I still think I could be right. Stick with me a little longer.

The Apostle told the amateur philosophers in Athens that everything in the earth had life and breath because of our Creator. (Acts 17:25)

To this day, we continue to live and move—and exist at all—because He sustains us. (Acts 17:28)

But I suppose it’s not the tree frogs that are evidence of the inhale and exhale of the world that lives around us. Not really.

Still, I contend that we have the power to choke or to replenish the breath of life to the world given us by our Creator.

I don’t just mean nature, either. Many have written and spoken about our responsibilities there and I don’t disagree. But, I have a more human aspect in mind.

On the Sunday afternoon just past, I heard the breathing again. I’m sure I did.

An invitation had come a week or so ago, suggesting that we might like to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of a friend with him and his family.

We thought we would, and so it was that we found ourselves in the social hall of a retirement village in a neighboring town. We had waited until the early arrivals cleared out a bit, so there wasn’t such a crush around our old friend.

I sat beside him and the memories came back with a rush. Forty years—give or take a couple of years—it has been that I’ve known him (much longer for the Lovely Lady, who grew up with his children).

All those years ago, he taught me how to breathe. Well, not really, but it seems so now.

In my teen years, I had developed a kind of stage fright that guaranteed I would never stand in front of a crowd and do anything by myself. Every time I attempted it, I could feel the heat rise from my neck, up into my face, as I turned a bright crimson red and became unable to continue. It had happened too many times. I would never—never— attempt it again.

He was patient. A little.

Planting the seed and encouraging me for a few weeks, he convinced me that all it would take to lead the singing in our little church was for me to stand there and sing along with the people. The only talking I needed to do was to call out a hymn number.

I was terrified and refused. Again and again.

He wouldn’t give up on me. Again and again, he asked. Just one more time than I refused, he asked.

I didn’t turn red. I didn’t freeze up. The people sang. I sang. I couldn’t believe it.

Since that time, I’ve been able to lead music many times. I’ve even preached numerous times.

Not once has the old fear returned. Not once.

Someone breathed encouragement into my lack of confidence, courage into my fear. He taught me how to breathe on my own.

I sat, last Sunday afternoon, remembering his kindness and was lost in the past for a moment or two before realizing that he was talking again.

I’ve written numerous times about the house the Lovely Lady and I moved into last year, the house in which she grew up. Her uncle built the structure, back in the nineteen-forties, and her family—first another aunt and uncle, then her mother and father—has lived here since.

I didn’t know that my old friend had helped to build the house, too.

“Oh yes, I helped to work on the foundation of that house. I remember taking the wire from the forms around the cement.”

I had no idea.

He laid the foundation to the house in which I live today.

I know now.

Need I go on? Would it be possible to miss a truth so obvious?

We breathe our life into the world around us, laying the foundation for a living breathing body which, in the next generation—or in the one after that, or the ten after that—will breathe its life into the world around it.

We breathe our life into the world around us, laying a foundation for a living breathing body which will breathe its life into the world around it. Click To Tweet

What if we refuse?

Selfish, rude, ignorant kids! What a waste of space!

I was all of that and more. And still, they breathed into my life.

What if they hadn’t?

What if we won’t?

Outside, the frog chorus has begun again.

Inhale. Exhale.

Breathe.

It’s Your breath in our lungs
So we pour out our praise
We pour out our praise
It’s Your breath in our lungs
So we pour out our praise to You only

And all the earth will shout Your praise
Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing
Great are You, Lord
(from Great Are You, Lord ~ Leonard/Ingram/Jordan ~ © Essential Music Publishing, Capitol Christian Music Group)

Then he said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to the winds, son of man. Speak a prophetic message and say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, O breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so they may live again.'”
(Ezekiel 37:9 ~ NLT ~ New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.)

Not My Tree

June 30, 2017June 30, 2017 ~ Paul Phillips ~ 2 Comments

Look, Grandpa! The tree’s broken!

The sweet seven-year-old, disheveled blonde hair flying into her eyes, spoke the momentous words without any idea of the turmoil they would bring. Within seconds, she was standing on a stepladder pulling little green fruit from the branches she could reach. I almost didn’t remember to warn her of the impending stomachache. Almost.

I was the one who felt as if he had been punched in the stomach.

The tree will die. It is inevitable.

I am sad.

It’s really not my tree. It doesn’t change how I feel about it.

The Lovely Lady and I are returning to her roots. For nearly seventy years, the old house and surrounding property have been part of her family, her parents having moved in the house within a few years of being married.

We’ve spent several months breathing new life into the house, with the property needing as much resuscitation as the building. Days, we’ve spent clearing overgrowth and dead limbs, along with more than a few saplings which had poked their branches up where they weren’t wanted.

But the old apple tree, with its gnarled limbs and bowed trunk—looking for all the world like an ancient fellow bent by years of backbreaking work—the old apple tree was meant to stay forever.

Forty years ago, it was. Four decades back, this summer, I first tasted the fruit from that tree. Sitting at the table, long hair to my shoulders and skinny as one of the branches of the tree, I ate—gobbled down, really—the serving of apple crisp set before me by the Lovely Young Lady’s mother.

Before the meal was done, I asked for another serving, and then another. Slightly tart, yet pleasingly sweet, the crunch of the crumbly crust almost a surprise as one chewed, it was a treat to be savored and assigned to the memory banks for a lifetime.

I expected a repeat performance later this summer when the little green apples—the ones the neighborhood deer herd can’t reach from their hind legs—have turned to shades of yellows and reds.

My granddaughter is right. The tree is broken. An errant wind, whipped up in a rainstorm a week or so ago, has twisted the gnarled, bowed trunk and opened a crack that, as an old friend used to say, you could sling a cat through.

I feel as if an old friend has been told he has mere weeks to live. The thought of losing this old companion is more than I want to contemplate, but still, my mind mulls over the future.

That night, my daughter assures me, the children went to bed with nary a sign of a bellyache. I’m the one who is sick to his stomach.

I suppose it’s laughable. I could understand an uninvolved individual chortling at the idea.

It’s a ratty old tree! Who cares if it dies? Plant another one there. Or—better yet—build a fire circle with a pit. Parties are better than apple crisp any day!

It’s not even my tree.

Well, in a way, I suppose it is. You might call it the family tree.

I know. Puns aren’t universally loved. I love them, though.

You see, the Lovely Lady can’t remember a day when that apple tree wasn’t there. I don’t know if her dad planted it or not, but he certainly tended it for decades, ensuring it would bear fruit and be there for the foreseeable future. In a way, you might say, it was his legacy.

A legacy.

Better than money or belongings, this thing left behind, this family tree, carries with it special powers. I look at it and am carried back forty years to apple crisp and fresh applesauce, straight from the Foley Food Mill. The Lovely Lady goes back another decade and remembers climbing the old tree with her siblings, each in their own quadrant, to pick and eat the not-so-sweet fruit to their heart’s content.

Years of family history have gone by, and the tree that is not mine has seen every minute of those years.

But, this I remember and take heart: The legacy will not die with the old tree.

Memories live in our hearts. Long after that old tree is gone, I will, in my mind, taste the delicious desserts made from its fruit.

The legacy left behind is so much more important than trees that perish in the storm or money that is soon exhausted in the marketplace.

I was grafted into her family tree decades ago; although once a stranger, I was never treated as anything but a son and brother. Her legacy is mine, and vice versa.

Funny. Suddenly, I’m thinking of that other family tree I’ve been grafted into.

You know the one I mean.

We’ve been grafted into God’s tree, to be a part of His family forever. (Romans 11:17)

Wild, unproductive branches, we.

Once, we were.

No longer. With roots that go deep, this tree’s legacy is ours forever.

Even though it was never our tree, to begin with.

What a gift!

How would we not carry on the legacy and share it freely?

Carry on His legacy. Share it freely. Click To Tweet

I’m still sad about the apple tree. Perhaps, I’ll plant another one.

Future generations may need to taste that apple crisp again.

I know I can still taste it.

And, it’s still good.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
(William James ~ American philosopher ~ 1842-1910)

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
(Psalm 1:3 ~ KJV)

The Storyteller

February 17, 2017February 17, 2017 ~ Paul Phillips ~ 1 Comment

So I says to him—I says—that’ll never go through this door.

My grandfather died the year I graduated from high school, but still, I hear his voice, telling another of his stories. Always—always, they were punctuated with spaces.

They were spaces in which he caught his breath.

When he walked from the front porch to the kitchen, he always stopped at the desk behind his easy chair. Every time. Leaning with his big hands on the edge of the desktop, he breathed deep, his powerful chest muscles expelling the bad air and drawing in good.

I felt the tell-tale tightening in my chest earlier today, a sign that my own bronchial issues may soon overtake me again. I couldn’t help but think of the old man.

Experience tells me that, even should I succumb to the malady completely, I will breathe freely again very soon. But, these moments remind me of folks who’ve gone before—people I have loved and who have loved me.

They remind me of other things, as well.

My grandfather, he of the interrupted sentences, was a storyteller. He loved a good story. More than that, he loved being surrounded by people who listened to the stories he told. The gaps for breathing, at first an annoyance to both the teller and the listener, soon became room for thought and reason for suspense.

A good storyteller uses the tools with which he is provided.

Grandpa was a good storyteller. Health impediment or not, he was going to tell his stories.

I’m a storyteller too. You might say, it’s in my blood. Kind of like the lung issues. From my grandfather to my son, the males in my family have experienced similar problems of varying degrees. Without a say in the inheritance, we have each passed down the frailty to the succeeding generation.

May I talk about the storytelling and passing things down for a moment? I promise to be nearly succinct. The reader will have to be the judge of whether the time is well spent.

Did you know our Creator commanded us to be storytellers? And, He expected us to pass the love of telling stories down through the generations? His instructions—oddly enough, passed through another storyteller—were clear.

Parents tell your children. Tell them in your home, as you’re hiking on a trail, and when you’re in the shopping centers. Through all the ages, tell them. Give them reason to believe and to trust in a God who provides and protects. (Deuteronomy 11:18-20)

The testimony of previous generations is a bridge over which we cross the raging floods of cultural deception and shifting doctrine. If we fail to provide those bridges for our children, our progeny will be washed away in the roiling currents and howling rapids.

Tell the stories! Use words that are accurate and attractive. Put them to music, rhyme the syllables, and give them rhythm. Paint them on a canvas, or carve them in stone.

Tell the stories!

The Lovely Lady—my favorite walking companion—and I wandered along an abandoned roadbed just a few days hence. We had a goal in mind, a century-old bridge, now abandoned, but still standing. It has not carried traffic for a number of years.

A monument to the past, the framework stands. There is even a roadway across, but a few steps onto it and one soon realizes that it will never support the weight of a vehicle again.

A monument—nothing more.

Bridges are meant to be more than monuments. Properly maintained and kept, they smoothly move traffic from the place left behind to the destination. Abandoned, they serve no purpose, but rust and rot into the landscape, forcing the traveler to choose a different route or be carried away in the flood.

I will build bridges.

With my last breath, I will tell the stories.

With my last breath, I will tell the stories. Click To Tweet

As my lovely companion and I wandered, almost sadly, away from the beautiful old span, I realized that my faulty lungs might make the half-mile trek back to the road difficult and wondered about the wisdom of making the trip.

I needn’t have worried. Companions are made to help each other on the road.

We don’t walk the road alone—don’t build the bridges alone—don’t cross them alone.

Surrounded by a great cloud of storytellers, we press on.

To our last breath.

Tell the Story.

Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit!
(Hebrews 12:1,2 ~ The Message)

For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.
(from A Horse and His Boy ~ C.S. Lewis ~ English author ~ 1898-1963)

He's Taken Leave

Random wanderings with Paul Phillips

generations

Breathing is Good

Not My Tree

The Storyteller