BackstageThere is an old man in my memory who played the accordion at every wedding, every quinceañera, every backyard where enough folding chairs could be borrowed, for as long as anyone could remember. His instrument was older than my father. The bellows were patched with tape in two places and it wheezed a little between phrases, like it was catching its breath, which as it turns out is exactly what it was doing.
I asked him once, when I was young and thought I was clever, why he did not get a better one. A keyboard, maybe. Something that did not have to be squeezed. He looked at me the way you look at a boy who has just told you he would rather not breathe so much, and he said something I did not understand for many years.
He said the accordion only makes music when the air is moving. And here was the part that stayed with me — he said it has to move both ways. Pull the bellows open and it sings. Push them closed and it sings again. There is no such thing as an accordion note that does not involve air passing through the reed. Stop the air in either direction and the instrument goes silent. It is not really a keyboard at all, he said. It is a pair of lungs with buttons.
I have been thinking about that rule ever since, because I am fairly sure it is also the rule for a soul.
The whole thing starts with borrowed air
Go back to the very beginning, to the making of the first man. The account is startlingly physical about it. Yahuah forms a shape out of the dust of the ground — no life in it yet, just clay in the shape of a person, lying there. And then He does the tenderest thing in all of Scripture. He bends down and breathes into it. He puts His own breath into the dust, and only then does the man become a living soul.
You were clay with the breath of God moving through you. That is not poetry I am adding. That is the diagnosis. Every note your life has ever made, every good thing that ever came out of you, was the reed of you vibrating because His air was passing through. The accordion does not manufacture its own wind. Neither do you. The old man's patched bellows and your patched-up heart run on exactly the same principle: no borrowed breath, no music.
I think we forget this constantly. We start to believe the sound is coming from us, that we are the source, that the reason there is music in our lives is that we are, at bottom, talented. And then a season comes when the air stops moving — grief, or exhaustion, or the long gray silence where God feels far off — and we panic, because we discover we cannot make a single true note on our own. We were never the wind. We were always the reed. And the reed is a beautiful thing, but it is silent until something greater than itself decides to breathe.
Praise on the way in and the way out
Here is where the accordion's second rule undid me, the both-ways rule.
We are good, in the church, at teaching people to breathe in from God. Receive His grace. Take in His word. Draw on His strength. Inhale. And that is true and we should never stop. But the accordion will not let you leave it there, because a pair of lungs that only ever pulls air in bursts. You have to push it back out. The instrument sings on the exhale as truly as on the inhale, and a soul that only receives and never returns anything is a soul holding its breath until it turns blue.
The last line of the Psalms is not complicated. It says let everything that has breath praise Yahuah. Everything that has breath. Which means the very evidence that you have received the gift — the fact that air is in your lungs at all — is the reason and the material for giving something back. Every breath is on loan, and praise is simply the exhale of a life that noticed. You pull His mercy in. You push His praise out. In, out, in, out, and the music is happening the entire time, on both halves of the motion, and there is never a moment where you are not either receiving or returning.
The old man understood this in his body without ever putting it in a sentence. Watch an accordionist and you will see it — the constant motion, open and close, open and close, never resting on one, because the second you stop moving the air the joy stops. He was not playing a machine. He was demonstrating a theology of the breath, all night, for people who only wanted to dance.
The music is for the dancing
And they did dance. That is the part I do not want to lose. This was not a lesson delivered from a stage. It was a wheezing patched-up accordion at a backyard party, and the whole reason the man kept the air moving both directions was so that his cousins and his neighbors and the shy teenagers along the wall would eventually get up and move.
I love that the breath God put in the first man was not given so that man could sit very still and think holy thoughts. It was given for living — for working and laughing and weeping and holding people and, yes, for dancing at your niece's wedding until your feet hurt. The breath is for the celebration. Worship at its fullest is not a solemn withholding of the exhale; it is a body given permission to move because it finally understands where the air came from and Who keeps sending more.
So let me ask you plainly, because the accordion asks it of me. Which direction have you stopped breathing?
Some of you have stopped pulling air in. You have been giving and serving and pouring out for so long that the bellows are collapsed and there is nothing left to push, and you are trying to make music on empty. You do not need to try harder. You need to open back up and let Him breathe into the dust of you again. That is not weakness. That is the first thing that ever happened to you.
And some of you have stopped pushing air out. You have received and received, sat under good teaching, taken in more grace than you will ever use, and gone silent — a lung holding its breath, a reed with all that wind sitting motionless behind it. The exhale is waiting. Some praise, some service, some love pushed back out toward God and toward the people He put in front of you.
The rule is the same as it was for the patched old accordion in my memory. The music only happens when the air is moving, and it has to move both ways.
Breathe, mi gente. In and out. That is where the song lives.
