Have you ever had a friend message you exactly what you needed to hear at the perfect moment? A few years ago, I received word that a friend I’d journeyed through Cancer simultaneously with had just been admitted into hospice care. It took my breath away. I was mourning in the mountains, when a friend messaged me this: “To inspire someone is way more than making them happy or amazed or even more than making them feel good. It is to lend them spirit when they are short, and of course because of the incorporeal nature of air and spirit, the act of inhaling becomes known as inspiration. In that sense, too, it is like mechanical ventilation for a soul that’s lost its resolve for a moment.” There comes a time in all of our lives where we need the encouragement and inspiration of another. The flip side of that coin is that sometimes when people need us, our first response is hesitation; because if we’re being really honest, which we are, helping hurting people is really, really hard. Many times, when the people around us need inspiration from us- they need mechanical ventilation from us, we don’t want to offer it because, let’s be honest, hurting people are difficult to be around. My husband and I were in the throes of raising three adolescent children, which can be a difficult feat in and of itself, but add in their history of childhood trauma, and effectively find us at the end of our rope. It was during a video consult with a child trauma specialist that I heard the analogy that transformed my perspective entirely. “Do you know the secret to getting out of a dog bite?” “What?” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Let’s say you see a dog & reach out your hand to pet it, but rather than welcome your affection, the dog sees you as a threat and attacks. Now your entire fist is trapped between the canine’s teeth.” Now that sounded familiar. Living with someone recovering from trauma feels a lot like being caught in a dog’s bite- unpredictable & painful. “How do you get your hand out with the least amount of damage? Human instinct will make you want to jerk back, yank your hand out of the dog’s mouth, but that’s when the damage happens. The secret? Push in.” I’ll admit that enduring hostility, even from a preteen, is painful. Everything within me wants to pull away, to retreat, to put as much space between us as I can manage. Yet in that very moment, everything the specialist had just said, my children’s trauma-informed behaviors, it all clicked into place for me. The secret to healing is to push in, to stay close. Then, what was once wounded in relationship can be healed in relationship. In order to be prepared to press in when the going gets tough, however, we need to regularly attend to our spiritual oxygen levels. So, I have for you today- 3 strategies for getting more spiritual oxygen in your life: 1. Retreat. Shut down, slow down, and invest in solitude and silence. Push in with Jesus. 2. Rest. Body, mind, and spirit. 3. Relationship. Expiration and inspiration in tandem. Both inhalation of the Spirit of God and exhalation in the relationship with others. Reciprocity- the secret to our healing. The best part? We have a heavenly Father who constantly and consistently models this response to our ill-informed reactions. This brings us to Altar Stone #12: Look for God’s presence within you. This week, I invite you to retreat from the crazy chaos of life, and in solitude and silence, push into Jesus. Leave the externals behind you for a moment, and turn inward.