God,
I am a prideful fool. I desire to be seen by men. My prayers are catered toward eloquence and enviable articulacy. I am self-centered and selfish. The governing narrative in my own consciousness is that which is constituted by my own consciousness and no more. It began with dust and will end with dust. Such is the dusty world I live in which you created. But dust was not made after the fall. Man was made from the earth as a part of your morally perfect will. I am a God-ordained accumulation of dust. Accumulated by your will and for your glory. These muscles are dust. This mind is dust. Even these thoughts are dust (Not so for their referents and antecedents, but the thoughts are dust just the same). And so, sitting here in this existence of dust, there is only one thing which saves me from a meaningless existence. There is only one thing which prevents me from being consumed by the muddy moisture of anti-theism and self-exaltation which fertilizes the earth of this world. It is my second constituent part. Breath. The breath of God is in me. Your breath is in me.
This is my confession: I can’t see past the dust. All I see is earth. I look in the mirror and see a suffocating corpse. Breathing, yet breathless. Help me to feel your breath again. Let my lungs inhale to your exhale. Let my heart beat with your blood. And let my dust not be the dust of animals or grass or mud (as the materialist sees it), but of you. Dust like you. Dust in your image. And so as a desperate compound of dust and breath, I cannot seem to find a balance. I want to be with your Spirit perfectly and dust-free! Or my dust prohibits me from even acknowledging my dualistic constituency.
I must now realize that it is not I who decides my constitution. It was you who decided when you made Adam. And in making Adam in your omniscience and sovereignty, so also you made me. And so I am, because of your eternal presence, eternally present with you in Genesis 1. But that is where my story ends. I do not proceed into Genesis 3:6. I do not eat the fruit. I do not inherit the curse. Day after seemingly godless day, I believe the lie and seek after a selfish and (self-deceivingly unbeknownst to me) pejorative knowledge of good and evil. But I do not inherit eternal damnation. Rather, my story finds its continuation in Romans 5. In Adam first for death, and in you second for life, who became dust to redeem dust.
So I pray, oh Christ, fully dust and fully breath: help me to be dust as you are dust, and to breathe your breath. For my lungs gasp for your breath at all times. Therefore, help my desperation for you not cause me to foolishly and immaturely inhale dust, but rather, help me to truly realize in my own life and heart that the efficaciously immanent cadence of your inhalation guards my dust and steadies my breath through my union to you, Christ Jesus.
Amen.
