I only listen to one thing while I’m running: Reving the Word from Revelation Wellness (and I listen very loudly). Alisa Keeton preaches over workout music, inviting different exertion levels from one to ten — a mix of Scripture and sweat and prophetic word that I absolutely love!

Something she often talks about is the simple, healthy power of nose breathing. When we breathe through our noses we filter what comes in — dust, bacteria, pollutants. The air slows down, warms, softens. It’s well studied. Our bodies are measurably healthier and steadier when we breathe this way.

She uses it as a kind of gauge for exertion levels: if I can still breathe through my nose, I’m probably running at a seven — although after a few nose breaths I’ll have to open my mouth. Once I can no longer breath through my nose, I’ve crossed into eight or nine. At that point I’m gasping and pushing.

One morning as she explained it again, Spirit whispered so clearly:

You can’t breathe through your nose when you’re going too fast.

I tuned out the podcast and spent the rest of the run ruminating on what it could mean to live a life too fast to breathe well.

Our pace determines what we’re able to filter. When we move slowly enough through our lives, we can “breathe through our nose,” letting what we take in be sifted through the Gospel: through love and our image-bearing identity.

But when we move too fast, we gulp air. We take in whatever the world offers — fear, outrage, comparison — and we breathe it back out as hurry, harshness, self-centeredness. Unfiltered air in. Unfiltered words out.

The air itself is polluted — the environment we live and work in, the culture around us. We can’t always change that. But we can choose our pace. We can slow down enough to give our souls a chance to filter what’s real, to let the Gospel clean what would otherwise make us sick.

So this is what I’m learning: The pace of my life determines the purity of my breath.

The slower I go, the more love colors what I experience — and grace shapes what I say.

Added January 23, 2026 :

It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. — Ephesians 2:1-2 MSG

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For more on how to slow your life’s pace:

book notes: get your life back →

the ruthless elimination of hurry by john mark comer →

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While this lesson was on slowing my breath, my last lesson was about movement itself and what it means to be carried by the wind of the Spirit.

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