Finding My Exhale

The nurse sits me down on the table and holds the stethoscope to my chest. I draw in deep, billowing breaths that make me dizzy. She listens.

“Well, you sound fine,” she says. “But the walking pneumonia patients all sounded fine and then were diagnosed when they got the x-rays.” There’s been an outbreak, a slew of Moody students who can’t breathe…and the stethoscope can’t tell.

Part of my education here consists of learning words, Greek words straight from the original, inspired Scriptures. For the first time, I can hear the echoed origins of my own language when people speak. When she says “pneumonia,” I notice it:

Pneuma.

Spirit.

It can also mean “breath” or “wind,” and I understand why it was used to name the illness. But it seems related somehow, deeper. I wonder sometimes if this epidemic is reflective of our spiritual state.

I’ve seen this before. My parents are in ministry and I grew up with a front-row seat to the realities of burnout. The swirling demands, the build-up of yes, and yes, and yes again, until one must say no to all things just to catch one’s breath. We live in a zero-to-sixty-to-zero society, one that accepts sharp spurts of productivity and success at the cost of long bouts of depression. We are either functional or bedridden, and if you aren’t bedridden, you will function. Your life—and the lives of all the others, it seems—depends on it.

We chafe at rest, squirm in our seats, strangle ourselves to gain the whole oxygen-sucking world…and lose our souls. I can feel the heavy atrophy as I type. My busyness suffocates my spirit.

And the stethoscope can’t tell. One conversation with these students won’t tell you what’s wrong. We have mastered functionality—rising from bed to look happy and useful. We’re in college; most days, survival seems to be our occupation. I cannot tell you how many nights I climb into bed regretting that I hadn’t slept sooner. “I’ll be in bed earlier tomorrow,” I always promise myself. But the next night finds me making all the same claims.

We laugh often. Every one of us could rattle off some beautiful prayer for another. We open our doors to the brave who would dare voice the fact that they are weary, that they can’t breathe—but for most of us, those brave don’t come, and we’re often too exhausted to help them even if they do. Without the x-ray, the persistent probing of the invested, no one is diagnosed.

I live one floor above the counseling office. I’ve heard the applications for an appointment are stacked high, everyone scrambling to cure themselves of this spirit-sickness they feel but cannot name on their own. I haven’t had to add mine to the pile yet, but there are days I wonder how long it will take. We are vulnerable here, open to self-exploration like never before, finally unshackled to be adults and, if we’re honest, not a single one of us comes in knowing what we are doing. We are born all over again, shocked by the cold air rushing into our lungs, but now it’s unacceptable to wail. We hold our breath instead, unleashing our wrestlings only in soft voices behind soundproof walls.

Our disease is one of pride and overthinking, and I didn’t need the x-ray to know that. My Physician told me Himself when I asked Him to expose what was wrong in me. And then I asked Him to heal me.

Some of the walking pneumonia patients had it easier.

Gradually, the chest pains subside, the coughing lessens, and the fluid clears. The physical epidemic leaves us. The spiritual epidemic continues, grows worse, but the Physician is faithful. He does provide an antidote.

I go for a walk with Aria, who didn’t fall prey to the sickness. She commanded the rest of us back to health, offering all the vitamins and hot tea, frowning at our laughing descriptions of serious symptoms. We all shrugged, said it would go away eventually, and it did. But she did well in the beginning and avoided it altogether. And now, as we meander Chicago, gulping in crisp November air, she holds a stethoscope to my spirit.

“Did I hear you say you’ve had a rough week?”

I look down, resist the urge to hold my breath. “Yeah, you did.”

“What’s made it hard?”

It’s the exhale that frees us. I spill my story, about the conflict, and insecurity, and weariness of it all, how I’d let down my guard and let Satan knock my feet out from under me, how I’d believed his lies.

“What lies have you been believing?”

And here is the x-ray. She will not let me go. I am pinned under her probing expertise; she knows that without deeper exploration, I will never be healed.

This is the answer. Pride and overthinking are killed in speaking our struggles. The asking is the x-ray; the confession is the cure. When someone knows about my failings, I am suddenly free to slow down, because the pressure is off: She knows I’m not perfect and she isn’t walking away.

I dislike this lesson. I dislike having to voice the fact that I am human and I have needs. It happens over and over again in the same week: I find myself taking one ragged breath and suddenly I’m under the scrutiny of a brother or sister who wants to see me healed. I dislike it—and then somehow it fills me with joy. The answer to our pneumonia, our spirit-sickness, is the Body of Christ. True fellowship, hard and ugly though it is, always leads to life and healing. James said it, long ago in that letter that gets me every time: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other, that you may be healed.” It’s the exhale that frees us, the letting go of all that is polluted and unhelpful within us to make room for what gives life. And we cannot do it alone.

Aria and I return to the campus, both of us a little regretful. We have spent an hour in rest, in breathing easily, and now we step back into the rigor of real life. But before we do, she ducks into a little alcove outside some of the many doors on campus that only open outward, the steps below Moody’s permanent exhale, and invites me to follow James’ instructions.

We lean in close to pray...