By Brother Brian Shimer
“Are you available? I’m having an attack,” the text read from the 31-year-old male client.
He called. He was home alone with his two young children and was panicking, hyperventilating, and crying.
Speaking slowly, I told him, “I want you to just breathe, focus on what it feels like to breathe, in slowly through your nose and now, breathe out through your mouth, even more slowly. Now keep it up.” Over the next five minutes, I just stayed with him while coaching his breathing. Every time he tried to talk, I reminded him just to breathe.
Then, I said, “Now is there anything with texture around you?”
“Yes,” he told me.
“I want you to touch it, and still breathing, think about what it feels like.”
These very basic exercises brought him out of his spinning thoughts into his body again. He calmed, the tears stopped, and we could talk.
To join Paul in rejoicing when suffering takes peace, we must embrace what Jesus has accomplished for us and enter by faith into “this grace in which we now stand” (Ro 5:2). This man, who knows the Lord, experiences PTSD and needed to learn to re-enter peace and stand there.
“Have I lost my salvation? Am I even saved?” He asked me. “Jesus has never left, friend,” I told him.
The enemy loves using suffering against us. But God (the most wonderful phrase in the English language!), BUT GOD intends to use suffering to transform us for the better. It produces perseverance in us and then “perseverance produces character,” Paul wrote in Romans 5:4a.
Character is an interesting word.
In the ancient world coins were made of precious metals with a certain weight. But people would file down a coin while keeping it in circulation (thereby keeping some of the metal for themselves). This meant a coin might “look” like the right coin for a transaction, but it would have the wrong weight; it lacked value. In ancient Athens at one point, there were 80 laws against people whittling down the coins in circulation!
Moneychangers who refused such coinage, men of honor and integrity, who put only fully weighted coins into circulation were given a name by the people. They were called “Dokimos” — the word Paul used here for proven or tested character. It refers to a metal tested by fire (or us through trial).
Perseverance forges within us tested character. We are changed on the inside, and this change shows up in how we relate to the world on the outside. So, friends, embrace the heat of suffering. Remember to breathe, and keep your feet established in the peace of God.
