Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!
Psalm 150:6 (NET)
Everything That Has Breath
The school library is going into ninety-four boxes, numbered in marker on two sides so the shelves can come back the way they came off. Six adults and four kids are doing it on a Saturday in August with the air conditioning shut down in the whole building.
He’s eleven and he’s there because his mother teaches third grade and there was nowhere else to put him. They gave him the low shelves, fair enough, and he’s slower on them than anybody. He opens things without reading them. He pulls a book out of the row, holds it open at the middle, lets the pages run past his thumb, then puts it in the box, and he does that to every one.
Trumpet, harp and lyre, timbrel and dancing, strings and pipe, cymbals twice over. All of that gets named first. Then, at the end of a hundred and fifty psalms: Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.
Whoever’s breathing qualifies. The instruments get named one after another, and breath is the last thing named and the only one. Everything that has breath takes in the ones who never learned an instrument, and the ones who can’t sing and know it.
Somebody comes back from the new room late in the day with a tape measure and a number, and the top shelf over there is shorter than the top shelf here, so every oversize book has to come out of boxes that are already taped and numbered. The four adults start at the far end and undo the morning. They put the boy outside the door with the tape gun and a stack of flats to fold, because he’ll be quicker at that than at anything else, and it isn’t true, and nobody minds.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, there’s breath in me this morning and nothing else I was asked to bring. Take it before the day gets it. Where I can’t make music, take the breathing on its own, and keep me at it past the point where I feel like it, all the way to the last of it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
