When Faith Becomes Breath

What is faith?

I thought I knew. But recently, I've come to understand it differently. It has a physical dimension I hadn’t considered before.

Faith, real faith, active faith, is permission to breathe. That is how I know when I am in it. Not when I say that I am, but when I take a breath instead of holding it.

It's a lesson I learned most clearly from motherhood.

You see, motherhood is where I learned to hold my breath, even before I ever held my daughter.

Finding out that you are having a child carries a different feeling for each of us. When you have had multiple miscarriages and have experienced a stillbirth, from the first moment you receive the news, you begin holding your breath. It’s just what happens. It is clearly a place where hope and reality collide. A challenge. Do I dare hope?

In my case, a great deal of the hope I was holding on to was cut short with that pregnancy at 27 weeks. In the early hours of February 13th, I woke up with a strange pain, and we somehow knew we needed to get to the hospital. The year was 1982. By 8:05 that morning, my daughter arrived via an emergency C-section delivery.  My beautiful girl arrived weighing just two pounds and five ounces.

I wasn't awake for her birth and by the time I was in recovery, she had been taken to Texas Children's Hospital in Houston.  My baby girl was receiving lifesaving and life preserving care in their neonatal intensive care unit.

Because it turned out that I was quite ill, I had to remain in the hospital where she was born. It felt like a world away from the one where she was fighting for her life. It would be another six weeks before I could make the trip to finally meet my daughter in person.

This was over 43 years ago. There was no FaceTime and no video calling. Just the kindness of strangers, or angels dressed in nurses uniforms as I came to think of them. They made an imprint of her very tiny hands and feet and put them on a small doily that was placed inside a red construction paper heart and fashioned into a Valentine's Day card for me.

They had that delivered to me the day after she was born. I could at least trace those tiny fingers and toes - even if I couldn't touch them.

Over the next few months, it would be a journey that took Lauren's father and me to places we could not plan for or anticipate. We had to make decisions that, by any estimation, felt like we were gambling with our daughter's life. Each time, we would pray and we would ask what faith would do. But even still, we held our breath.

In the early hours and days, the first questions were about her survival. But they didn’t end there. That was only the first question. The decisions that began to face us after that were against the backdrop of other fears that she would possibly be blind, unable to walk, or even to learn.

It wasn’t just one fear. It was a corridor of fears, one opening into the next. We weren’t just afraid she would die. We were afraid of what living might look like. But we loved her through all of it anyway. We held on to hope and faith, even if it felt precarious.

And I learned in those days that you can experience faith and fear in the same space.

People would tell us that we had to replace our fear with faith. But while they meant well, they also didn't understand moments like those we were facing. You don't replace fear with faith. You are still afraid. But what you have hope for and have faith in has to be stronger than the fear. And it was. But we were still holding our breath.

I didn’t realize how much of that breath I was still holding—until this past year.

Lauren and her family had traveled to Florida for vacation and ended up stranded there for nearly an extra week due to flight issues. There was nothing wrong. They were safe, together, even making the most of it.

And yet I found myself calling several times a day, braced for something. I even told her I knew I was being ridiculous. But I couldn't seem to help myself.

And then, in one quiet moment, I realized — I could.

I could help myself. I could just breathe. I could trust, and know that whatever happened, she would be okay. We all would be.

I could finally see it.

For me to fully experience faith, I had to surrender my fear as a mother. I had to give myself permission to breathe. And not only to trust, but to fully experience gratitude that God was there. Every year. Every birthday. Every moment. Every breath.

My daughter is now 43. A mother herself with three daughters. Happily married and living a rich life in Alaska. She graduated from college with honors, climbs mountains, has dived the depths of oceans and defied every single fear that began in those early hours of her first breath.

Faith. It's permission to breathe.

That’s my Mother’s Day gift to myself this year—to take that deep breath and to fully celebrate the miracle of motherhood, life, and all that it holds.

What about you?

Is there a place in your life where you are holding your breath? You, like me, may not even be aware of it, but it’s where we can begin to more fully understand faith.

For all of us, what holds true is that we hold our breath because we've learned that time has a way of changing things. That joy feels provisional. That if we exhale fully, we might disturb something. We wait for the other shoe to drop. We protect ourselves from a future we can't see by never fully inhabiting the present we're standing in.

But there is another way to see those moments.

If that is where you find yourself, a place where you are making hope smaller so that you can feel a bit safer, let my story be an invitation for you to breathe.

Take that breath. Because on the other side of it isn’t something fragile.

It’s your life. The life that faith has been holding for you all along.

It’s already here. Just waiting for you to breathe it in.