The Long Breath

In the dark space of my fracturing marriage, I was frantically striking matches. Then, I met the long nose of God.

Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

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Sitting there in the dark, I reflected on what I thought my life was going to be — what I had expected.

Several years had passed since we were married. Now, those expectations lay shredded in a heap with so many others. When you’re young, you grow up carrying certain ideals of what life “should” be. As a Christian, those ideals can feel less like hopes and more like promises. A perfect marriage to a man who loves God and knows how to perfectly love me.

I lived with those strange extremities — perfection or failure, with absolutely no in-between.

Of course, there is no perfection in life, yet failure felt like death. And when those two rigid standards become do-or-die for you, it creates a horrible void that you spend your life tiptoeing around, hoping beyond hope you never fall in.

I fell in.

My husband wasn’t perfect. My marriage wasn’t perfect. But back then, I was completely missing the fact that I was a huge part of the problem. The life I was trying so desperately to curate was just smoke and mirrors. The closer it came to cratering, the harder I worked to throw scotch tape over the seams.

But when the floor gave way, what was beneath me?

The void.

The bottomless void full of broken dreams, shredded expectations, and a fractured reality. It was like an earthquake had split apart the smoke and mirrors, leaving every illusion exposed. I began to see the magic trick for what it was.

I was the magician, but the magic had stopped working.

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If you have been reading along with this series over the last three weeks, you know that this bottomless void is exactly where the Holy Spirit began His deepest work.

When my curated foundation shattered, I thought I was being buried alive. But as we looked at Love, we came to realize that the crushing weight of that earth wasn’t a tomb. It was God planting me like a seed in the dark, fertile soil of His love.

In the months that followed, I discovered Joy—not as a fleeting feeling, but as a fortress that protected my heart from the carving arrows of grief while I was under the surface.

Finally, we talked about Peace—the relational anchor that finally allowed me to let go of the steering wheel, stop striving to fix the wreckage myself, and trust the One holding me together.

But let’s be honest about what it actually felt like to sit in the dark before the peace arrived.

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Long before I learned to drop my hands and rest, I was furious.

I felt utterly stuck.

I had spent months preparing to leave my marriage, convinced it was the only way to save myself. But despite my plans and determination, something deeper anchored me. An anchor of conviction.

Walking away was not an option.

It wasn’t what God wanted.

Waves of anger crashed over me. I was angry at my circumstances, angry at the man sleeping beside me, and, if I’m being completely honest, angry at God for keeping me there.

Days turned into months as I floated aimlessly, offering God nothing but silent resentment and endless, bitter tears.

He didn’t walk away.

He didn’t strike me down for my anger.

He didn’t get fed up with my timeline or tell me to pull myself together.

He just sat with me in the dark.

That is where I met the fourth fruit of the Spirit, and it didn’t look like an emotion. It looked like an impossibly long, divine fuse. It looked like longsuffering.

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Longsuffering.

I had seen this word in Scripture many times. I had always associated it in my mind with patience. And, patience is part of it, but it’s a very specific kind of patience. Makrothumia, the Greek word used in Galatians 5, combines makros (long) and thumos (temper or passion).

Interestingly, when ancient translators chose this Greek word, they were trying to capture a striking Hebrew idiom: erekh appayim, which literally translates to being “long of nose.”

In the ancient Near East, the universal sign of burning anger was a person breathing heavily through flared, red-hot nostrils. To say God was “long of nose” meant it took an incredibly long time for His nostrils to flare up in wrath. He takes a long, slow breath before He reacts.

And that is where the mirror turned toward me.

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For months, my own breathing had been shallow, sharp, and furious. I had been focusing entirely on the flaws and fractures in my husband. I kept a running tally of every disappointment, every wound, every shortcut. My own nose was short; my fuse had burned down to absolute ash.

But as I sat there, wrapped in the silent, unyielding patience of a God who refused to flare up at me, a conviction settled heavily in the room.

How could I demand an infinite fuse from heaven while holding a match to my own marriage?

Photo by Mariana Beltrán on Unsplash

Experiencing makrothumia didn’t instantly fix the wreckage around me, but it did something more urgent: it changed my posture. It meant that instead of packing my bags in my mind every single night, I had to learn to take a breath, drop the match, and let God slowly expand my fuse to resemble His.

Where this applied to my marriage, the shift was tectonic.

I was no longer hopelessly drowning in the angry, suffocating sea of my own resentment. God’s arm of longsuffering reached down into the dark water and pulled me up into the safety of His boat. And the moment my feet hit the deck, the rigid extremities I had lived by for years—that demand for absolute perfection or else total failure—simply fell away.

I began to see my husband through an entirely new lens. I realized that if the Creator of the universe could take a long, slow breath with my fractured soul, I could afford to take a long, slow breath with his.

It didn’t happen overnight. It took months, even years, of slow, intentional practice for the two of us to learn how to extend that kind of makrothumia to one another. There were days we still reached for the matches. But in that quiet room, that surrendering of the short fuse, was the exact starting point of our healing.

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Pull Up a Chair

If you find yourself sitting in the suffocating dirt today—bumping into the people who have hurt you, nursing a fuse that has burned down to absolute ash—I want to invite you to take a breath.

Step out of the storm for a moment. Pull up a chair on the porch with me, and let’s look at the dirt from a different perspective.

Longsuffering is not a grueling sentence to become a doormat for people who mistreat you. It is the fierce, calm strength of a soul that knows it is entirely safe inside the fortress of God’s Joy and anchored by His Peace. When you know you are fully protected by heaven, you no longer have to spend your days frantically striking matches to defend your perimeter.

You can afford to hold your fire. You can afford to give others a long, slow breath.

The Husbandman is not finished with the soil of your life, and He isn’t finished with the people buried next to you, either. Trust His fuse today. Drop your matches into the dirt, and let Him expand your capacity to love the imperfect.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

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Questions for the Porch:

• Where is your fuse the shortest right now? Are you demanding perfection from a relationship, a church, or a circumstance where God is simply asking you to extend makrothumia?

• How has God shown you a “long nose” (patience) in your own seasons of wrestling? How can remembering His patience change the way you take a breath with the people around you this week?