For an introduction and Chapter 1 go here; for Chapter 2 go here.
Jon Foreman, Switchfoot & Me
Ch. 3 – Breathing Lessons
Here we come to the album that I missed completely when it released. Maybe the reason was that I had drifted a little from the tastes of my high school days. After all, I was 19, newly married, pregnant before our first anniversary, and knocked out of all normal function for months by twenty-four hour “morning” sickness. Music had drifted to the background of my attention. And Switchfoot’s release of Learning to Breathe was completely off my radar.
But somewhere in the two-plus decades since then, two songs from this album entered my collection of words to hold onto.
The first, Dare You to Move, was one of Switchfoot’s huge mainstream hits, and made a repeat appearance on a subsequent album.
Every time life has felt like an endless cycle of the same weary repeat, I would return to the lines from the chorus:
I dare you to move
I dare you to lift yourself up off the floor
I dare you to move
Like today never happened before
I never imagined those words could become so literally applicable to my life.
And the other lines that I held onto, when I was drawn to imaginations of relief via running away, brought me back to the truth again and again.
Where can you run to escape from yourself
Where you gonna go
Salvation is here
Salvation is always here because Christ is always here. Something I will probably need reminding of all my life.
The second song I absorbed ended up becoming my guide for living the past year and a half, first because it gave words to what I was experiencing.
Hello, good morning, how you been?
Yesterday left my head kicked in
I never, never thought that
I would fall like that
Never knew that I could hurt this bad
And as Jon Foreman is so skilled at doing, after the lyrics met me where I was, they carried me forward to hope.
This is a way that I say I need You
This is a way that I say I love You
This is a way that I say I’m Yours
This is a way
This is a way
That I’m learning to breathe
I’m learning to crawl
I’m finding that you and you alone can break my fall
When I found myself in the place where I could do nothing, breathing became my daily offering. Of worship. Of perseverance. Of acceptance. Of learning in the deepest of ways that if I know nothing else, I know this:
