Breathe

The story behind it

Anger has always been something I’ve had to work on.

I don’t mean some wild, explosive version of anger that has defined my life. Mine has usually been quieter than that. It builds. It sits in my chest. It changes the way I hear people, the way I interpret what they meant, and the way I respond to things that didn’t go the way I expected.

Over the years, I’ve started to see how much of that anger begins with expectation.

I expected somebody to respond a certain way.

I expected a situation to work out differently.

I expected myself to handle something better.

I expected work to go one way, home to feel another way, a conversation to land differently, a plan to stay on the plan.

Then reality moves somewhere else.

That gap between what I expected and what actually happened has caused me more trouble than I realized for a long time.

When I’m stressed, I can start looking outward pretty quickly. You did this. You should have known. You should have handled it differently. This shouldn’t be happening. Somebody needs to fix this.

I can build a pretty convincing case.

And if I stay there long enough, I can turn myself into the victim of a situation I helped create in my own head.

That realization has been uncomfortable for me.

I’ve learned that I can surrender a lot of peace by handing control of my emotional state to whatever somebody else says, does, forgets, changes, or fails to understand. Then I sit there waiting for the outside world to change before I give myself permission to feel settled again.

That has been debilitating at times, especially when home stress and work stress start stacking on top of each other.

This song came out of learning to interrupt that cycle.

Breathe.

Give the moment a little room.

Stop building the case.

Stop rehearsing what everybody else did wrong.

Be still long enough for the Spirit to get a word in.

That last part matters to me.

I can spend so much time explaining a situation to myself that I leave almost no room for God to tell me anything about it. My own voice gets loud. My reasoning gets fast. My certainty gets stronger.

The Spirit usually works differently with me.

He slows me down.

He turns my attention inward.

He helps me see where I have agency again.

Sometimes the answer is repentance. Sometimes it is patience. Sometimes it is letting another person be imperfect without making their imperfection responsible for my peace.

Sometimes I simply need to breathe.

This is the first song I’ve written since finishing the last volume of books I printed, and that feels fitting to me. Those books captured a lot of what I had been learning and trying to put into words during that season of my life. “Breathe” feels like the beginning of another chapter.

I’m still learning this one.

I still catch myself assigning motives, keeping score, expecting people to operate according to a script they never agreed to, and getting frustrated when life refuses to cooperate with the version of it I had already built in my head.

But I am getting better at hearing that moment sooner.