Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: BREATH (11/19/20)
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TITLE: That Miraculous First Breath | Previous Challenge Entry
By Dave Walker
11/26/20 -
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For nine months his lungs, starting as little buds when he is just five weeks old, grow in preparation for that first breath. While in the womb, however, they cannot provide vital oxygen to the tissues, nor can they expel the carbon dioxide which forms from the body’s metabolism. These functions must be outsourced.
To this end, God has designed a temporary organ which, though here just for the pregnancy, is one of the wonders of the human body --- the placenta.
Arteries from the mother feed her blood, rich in oxygen and nutrients, into the placenta. Into little swirling lakes of her blood, thousands of finger-like structures protrude --- emissaries via the umbilical cord from the baby, carrying Adam’s blood. The mother’s blood and Adam’s never mix --- he is a separate individual from birth. However, within the placenta, oxygen, antibodies for immunity, and vital nutrients diffuse across from her blood to the fingers protruding into it. At the same time, toxins cross over to the mother for her to expel. From the very start, God has ordained that a mother should nurture and protect her unique individual, knit together in her womb, and fearfully and wonderfully made in His image.
Because Adam’s lungs are not functional, God has designed a way of bypassing them. A hole between the chambers of the heart, allows some of the blood which would normally go to the lungs, to be shunted back into another part of the heart and away from the lungs. Any remaining blood going to the lungs gets propelled through an artery that takes it from there to join the blood going to the rest of the body.
So, the anatomy of the baby’s circulation, before it is born, differs vastly from ours.
Yet, the time comes when Adam’s comfortable world is disrupted. The walls of his home press ever harder down on him. He is crammed headfirst down a small passage. So tightly is he jammed, that the little plates forming his skull are squashed and moulded. As his face emerges into the light, his lungs, passing through the canal, undergo the same compression, squeezing the amniotic fluid out of them, in preparation for the first intake of air.
Adam comes into his strange new world with a gasp, creating enormous negative pressure in his lungs, expanding them, and filling all the little air sacs with air. Then he gives a cry, further expanding them.
Every time I witness that first breath, I am awed by the miracle taking place. Yet unseen, other miracles also proclaim the glory of God to a world unaware. As Adam fills his lungs, the hole in his heart closes, the artery that shunted the blood away from the lungs also closes, and blood can now perfuse his lungs. The newborn baby, at the first breath, has the whole anatomy of his heart and circulation altered. His lungs, too, having lain dormant and filled with fluid, now pulsate with blood, and expand with air. Thus, the new arrival, in terms of its anatomy is a new creation.
How wonderfully God gives us physical examples of spiritual truths.
“Unless you are born again,” Jesus says, “you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“If anyone is in Christ,” says Paul, “he is a new creation.”
We start our lives at home in this world, happily cocooned in our worldly possessions and our carnal desires. Yet in God’s time, we become uncomfortable with these things. The fame is empty, the achievements unsatisfying, material things fleeting and relationships difficult. As we are squeezed through a spiritual birth canal, Jesus invites us to a new birth. If we accept and are born again, our spiritual physiology changes. Our heart beats to a joy hitherto unknown, as we breathe deeply of the Spirit of God. The accusing lies that circumvented the fresh air of God’s forgiveness are shut --- silenced by the forgiving blood of Jesus that surges now through our spirits. In the ruach of God, we can breathe freely.
Every time I hear a newborn baby cry …… then I know why, I believe.
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