As a physician, I witness countless first and last breaths. As a Christian, I am constantly reminded of how God breathes life into us through his Spirit.<\/p>\n
by MARIELLEN VAN NIEUWENHUYZEN<\/strong><\/p>\n The scalpel sliced through the uterine wall. The amniotic sac ruptured, and fluid flowed across the blue surgical drapery toward me. The obstetrician\u2019s fingers curled around the baby\u2019s head while my gloved hands pressed firmly against the mother\u2019s abdomen. The baby was larger than we had expected. I shifted my full body weight against the mother\u2019s belly, and, at last, the newborn\u2019s head slipped through. Her shoulders quickly followed, and there she lay, eyes taking in the bright world for the first time.<\/p>\n Before she could cry, she took her first breath. Air rushed in,\u00a0pushing aside\u00a0fluid that had filled her lungs from six weeks of gestation. The oxygen diffused through the blood vessels of the alveoli, tiny air sacs within her lungs, relaxing the pulmonary arteries and allowing blood to course through her lungs for the first time. The short vessel connecting her lung arteries and heart began to close. Pressure built in her heart,\u00a0causing the\u00a0tiny hole between its chambers to snap shut.<\/p>\n She breathed more vigorously than anyone else in the operating room, her purple hue softening to a rich pink. Squinting against the glaring light above, she cried again. What a foreign world this is\u2014where air becomes breath, and then breath returns to air.<\/p>\n Ruach<\/em> is a Hebrew\u00a0word meaning\u00a0breath, wind,\u00a0or spirit<\/a>. (In the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, it is rendered as pneuma<\/em> or pneumon<\/em>, the roots from which we get many English words pertaining to lungs.)<\/p>\n In Genesis,\u00a0ruach\u00a0<\/em>is both the\u00a0Spirit of God bringing light and order into an unordered world (1:1\u20134) and the breath of life that God breathes into Adam (2:7). Psalm 33:6 says, \u201cBy the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath (ruach<\/em>) of his mouth all their host,\u201d and Job affirms that \u201cthe spirit (ruach<\/em>) of God is in my nostrils\u201d (27:3, ESV throughout).<\/p>\n We also see God\u2019s\u00a0ruach<\/em>\u00a0animating and energizing all of creation, including us. Breathing in God\u2019s\u00a0ruach\u00a0<\/em>shapes us into his image, and just as the newborn\u2019s internal anatomy was physiologically shaped by her first breath, so too does God\u2019s\u00a0ruach<\/em>\u00a0change us and give us new life. In the Old Testament, the Spirit of God\u00a0promised the\u00a0future salvation and renewal of all of God\u2019s people, and at the Last Supper, Jesus promised the Spirit would come to his followers as \u201cthe Helper\u201d to teach, guide, and \u201cbe with you forever\u201d (John 14:16, 26).<\/p>\n When \u201cthe goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us,\u201d Paul wrote to Titus (3:4\u20136), \u201cnot because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.\u201d<\/p>\n We are constantly reminded of that need for renewal. Just moments after returning from that C-section\u2014still marveling at the miracle of first breaths\u2014I crowded into a cramped ICU room, trying desperately to palpate a femoral pulse on a patient between chest compressions. No breath. No pulse. I watched her chest rise and fall with each compression and heard the rush of oxygen as the respiratory therapist artificially filled her lungs. But it was not a true breath. It was not her own\u00a0ruach<\/em>.<\/p>\n Time began to blur. Two minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty. \u201cPlease, don\u2019t stop!\u201d the patient\u2019s daughter cried from behind me. But 45 minutes later, there still was no pulse. No matter how hard we tried, her\u00a0ruach<\/em>\u00a0would not return.<\/p>\n Ecclesiastes says that \u201call are from the dust, and to the dust all return\u201d (3:20), but that as \u201cthe dust returns to the earth as it was,\u201d the \u201cspirit (ruach<\/em>) returns to God who gave it\u201d (12:7). Without the context of Christ\u2019s incarnation, death, and resurrection, the fact that God takes away his\u00a0ruach<\/em>\u00a0can be a very somber thought. Yet the rich news is that because God himself experienced a first breath and a last, we are offered renewed life in the Spirit to restore and sustain us.<\/p>\n Christ too was forced from the familiar rest of his mother\u2019s womb into a bitter, cold world, his body contorting as air reeking of manure and sour hay poured into his lungs. To think, God\u2019s\u00a0ruach<\/em>\u00a0poured into Christ\u2019s own flesh.<\/p>\n It left his body too, as he took his last breath as our perfect and righteous Savior on the cross. \u201cJesus called out with a loud voice, \u2018Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (ruach<\/em>)!\u2019 And having said this he breathed his last\u201d (Luke 23:46).<\/p>\n Following his resurrection, Christ appeared to the disciples. His own ruach<\/em> restored by God, in vindication of his sacrifice, he \u201cbreathed on them and said to them, \u2018Receive the Holy Spirit (ruach<\/em>)\u2019\u201d (John 20:19\u201322). Then, at Pentecost, there was \u201ca sound like a mighty rushing wind (ruach<\/em>) … and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit (ruach<\/em>)\u201d (Acts 2:2, 4). As God breathed life into Adam at Creation, so too Christ breathes the Spirit into his disciples.<\/p>\n This was the promised renewal. God promised that he would give us a new heart and put a new spirit within us. He promised to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh\u2014that he would put his Spirit within us and move us to follow his decrees and laws (Ezek. 36:26\u201327). At last, David\u2019s plea in Psalm 51:10\u2014\u201cCreate in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me\u201d\u2014was fulfilled, and the prophesy of the Old Testament rulers was\u00a0made complete. Now, all people are offered the sustaining breath of his Spirit through the death and resurrection of God\u2019s own son.<\/p>\n How then shall we respond? Every breath, every gust of wind, every act of the Spirit\u2014in all of these may the\u00a0ruach<\/em>\u00a0of God remind us to do what the final psalm commands (150:6): Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!<\/p>\n Mariellen Van Nieuwenhuyzen (MD, UC Davis School of Medicine) is a family medicine resident physician who writes for several online Christian publications and literary magazines.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a9 2024 Christianity Today<\/strong>\u00a0– a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. “Christianity Today” and “CT” are the registered trademarks of Christianity Today International. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a physician, I witness countless first and last breaths. As a Christian, I am constantly reminded of how God breathes life into us through his Spirit. by MARIELLEN VAN NIEUWENHUYZEN The scalpel sliced through the uterine wall. The amniotic sac ruptured, and fluid flowed across the blue surgical drapery toward me. The obstetrician\u2019s fingers <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":82110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3380,4661,276,266],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-leadership-articles","category-resources-ndi","category-sunday-school-and-discipleship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mesonaz.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}