As a middle school student, he had a rather unusual experience being buried in the ground and then dug up by those around him. It was such a strange incident that some people misunderstood and made more of it than what really happened.
That year was unusually dry, and the fields of the island village where he lived were filled with parched rice paddies. Since the school was closed temporarily, the children were instructed to help with water supply work instead of attending school.
His family worked on extending the water channel to the village pond. If you dug deep into the sandy ground, you could find a vein of groundwater to expand the water supply to the pond. With others, he found a vein about 3 meters underground. When the ground was hit with a pickaxe, the disturbance and resonance of the sound shook the ground on both sides of the dug hole's wall, and the mud and dirt covered them instantly. The movement of the earth that he felt is still vivid; he could feel the pressure increasing as it filled the space between his neck and limbs. He tried to breathe, but even though it was sandy soil, the air didn't pass through as if blocked by plastic.
They said it took us about 5 minutes to dig our faces out of the dirt with our hands, and he realized how much of a blessing it was to inhale and exhale.
When middle-aged and quit smoking cigarettes that he had smoked for years, this memory came back to him and made him think. To mix this blessed air with smoke and inhale it into his body…
It was the same when he was watching his father's bedside when he was dying. His body, with several hoses connected, was struggling to extend his time on earth; inhalation was difficult. He watched helplessly to see if the exhalation could lead to another inhalation or vice versa. The sound of breathing in the darkness was like a snail crawling across a tidal flat. That’s how he understood the meaning of ‘the time of one breath’.
He heard that Usain Bolt, the world record holder for the 100-meter dash, breathes little from the start to the finish line. He is said to be doing anaerobic exercise for about 9 seconds, during which he must tense his entire body and release explosive energy. It is said that even veteran female divers on Jeju Island can stay underwater for about 5 minutes with a single deep breath. Let’s leave the argument that the gap between inhalation and exhalation is the minimum unit of time a living organism feels, and is unique to each individual.
In the midst of all that is going on in our lives, slowing down to breathe is not an easy task, but it is a time of resurrection for people of faith, a time when all our values and preconceived notions are regularly checked against a new standard. Let's reset our time units and connect the things we see and evaluate in the visible realm with the things beyond. Inhale and exhale, break up the units of time, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, carefully cross the thresholds of daily life, pondering what transcendent life mechanisms God has designed just for me.
