The lockdown period has allowed me an opportunity to come across some amazing television shows that I had never known about! One such program is Todd Sampson’s Body Hack series.
The premise of this show is that Todd Sampson experiences some really extreme situations and tracks how the human body is able to adapt in the circumstances.
One episode sees Todd trekking through the Himalayas. As he is climbing thousands of feet above sea level, the level of oxygen dramatically reduces. This ‘thin air’ can cause all sorts of issues for the human body. As Todd Sampson was able to show, his heart rate rises significantly, as does his blood pressure. His body starts to produce a mass of red blood cells to increase the ability to carry oxygen throughout his body so that it could function successfully. He also demonstrated how our breath vitalises and brings life to our body. We need to breathe in order to exist, but we also need breath to renew our strength and revitalise our energy.
Consider for a moment the amazing action of our heart and lungs. Our heart is one of the main organs of the body. It expands and contracts thousands of time per day, and every time it does it pumps oxygenated blood along our arteries and blood vessels until it reaches the extremities of our body. Blood supplies vital oxygen to every cell in our body before returning to our lungs, where fresh oxygen is collected from the air we regularly breathe in. This oxygenated blood then enters the heart and the whole cycle begins again! We simply cannot live without oxygen. When we are deprived of it, as Todd Sampson demonstrated while trekking the Himalayas, we become confused, disorientated and prone to passing out!
As I read the following passage from the New Testament book, Romans, I realised that this biological principle also has a spiritual application. It states; “You yourselves experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive and present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, He’ll do the same thing in you that He did in Jesus, you are delivered from that dead life. With His Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!” (The Message translation)
It’s the same in the sphere of the Spirit. All of us from time to time stand in need of inner revitalising and an in-rush of spiritual strength.
Advertising constantly tells us to refresh our physical being, but the refreshing I am referring to is not the body but the part of our beings called the soul. We need to refresh our souls. If we are to gain spiritual freshness then it’s important that we learn to regularly expose our spiritual lungs to the invigorating, revitalising freshness of the breath of the Holy Spirit. This is why I love the words of the song by Marie Barnett, as it really seems to capture this principle. “This is the air I breathe, Your holy presence living in me. This is my daily bread, Your every word spoken to me.”
My prayer for each of our students and for you is that God will show us and help us to draw in deep breaths of the Holy Spirit, so that our spiritual lungs may take in the pure air and that this will revitalise and energise each of us from the inside out.