This-Happened-to-Me

One moment your sitting in your daughters Tree House nailing away at a board, then suddenly the board you’re sitting on breaks away. I fell head first 35 feet straight down, (which by the way happens quicker than I would have guessed), I did have time to think this is not going to be good, then BAM!   I knew I should have moved those rocks below, yes I did sort of bounce coming down on my neck and right shoulder. I knew it hurt really bad, but initially it felt like it just knocked the wind out of me, it did do that, but the problem was that with broken ribs and a collapsed lung getting the wind back in me seemed hopeless.

Being a deer hunter I knew that I may not have but about 7 minutes to get some air in my lungs, and nobody knew I was out there or had fallen. I didn’t walk for several days afterward but somehow got the strength to pull my self to the house and into the living room, collapsing on the floor I struggled to utter the few words, “call 911”..

My wife having no idea what was going on said and I quote, “Are You Sure?”

The ambulance did come quickly but that struggle to breathe is something I will never forget breaking a number of ribs on my right side that then punctured my right lung, gasping for any breath as I felt my life ebbing away all I wanted was a breath. Little did I know the depth of understanding that fall would provide to Jeremiah 32:41

“Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul.”

In this verse and Deut 6:4  “whole  soul” is a translation of the word “Nephesh” both the center of appetite and properly the breathing of an animal from it’s root “Naphash“. That desire is a phenomenal longing I wouldn’t really understand without the fall experience I just described…just try holding your breath and you get a sense of it….

Now picture Christ on the cross gasping for breath as this was the torture endured in a crucifixion… His very nephesh was this verse that we would be planted in His Kingdom ….Oh Lord let my whole heart my whole nephesh cry out for You as I cried out for my next breath that day.