God’s “breath of life” makes us more

I wonder what I would be if God did not live in me. Would I dream? Would I wonder? Would I even hope to own a soul through eternity?  (Living Calm 2016)

After describing the size and magnificence of the night sky, the psalmist asks the Creator: “What are human beings that you think about them; what are human beings that you pay attention to them?” (CEB Ps. 8:4). I love it that such questions were asked thousands of years ago. They indicate that we humans have always introspected about who we are and why we are and what we are.
We wonder about so many things. We review the past and dream of a future. We imagine how we would like things to be and get anxious about how they might instead be. And, more importantly, we feel within ourselves something that is unique, an individuality that is separate from everything around us.
When God breathed His divine inspiration, his “breath of life,” into each living soul, He made our lives more than just physical existence, more than just an endless stream of sensations. He set us on an irreversible forward progress of experience. He inspired us with the higher capacities of insight and wondering and worshipping. Without these higher realms of consciousness, we wouldn’t be able to know God. And He wants us to know Him. He created us to know Him.
For me, the psalmist is determining that as well when he says that God has made human beings “only slightly less than divine, crowning them with glory and grandeur” (8:5). Each of us is unique, each of us is God’s special creation. Our consciousness, the part of us that questions and wonders and dreams, is the Creator’s gift to every individual for all eternity. Opening our lives just a little to this inheritance, this “glory and grandeur,” frees us and fills our soul with light.