Breath Before Anybody Asked

There is a headland at the end of that road and Tama has walked out to it most evenings for about thirty years, and last summer his granddaughter ruined it for him in the best possible way.

She is six. She had been given a fact at school and she was carrying it around the way six year olds carry facts, deploying it at people.

The fact was how many times a person breathes in a day.

She told him on the way out to the point, at some volume, over the wind. Twenty thousand.

He said that seemed like a lot.

She said it is twenty thousand and she was very firm about it and she had clearly had this conversation with several adults already.

They got to the point and she went off to do what she does out there, which is to find a particular kind of stone, and Tama sat down on the flat rock and looked at the water and did what he has done on that rock for thirty years, which is take stock.

He is a man who keeps accounts. Not written ones. But he could tell you, roughly, what he has been given in his life and what he has done with it, and there is a rough sense of a page with two sides that he has been running since he was about twenty.

And he sat on that rock and thought: twenty thousand a day.

He is seventy-one. He did some of it and then stopped because the number stopped meaning anything and started being a different kind of thing entirely.

Five hundred million, more or less. Give or take.

Not one of them requested. Not one of them acknowledged at the time. Every single one of them arriving whether he was awake or asleep, whether he was being good or being difficult, whether he was on that rock or in a hospital or in an argument.

He said to his granddaughter on the way back, and she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, "That number does not go on either side of my page."

You may keep a page as well. Most people do, in some form, and it is usually a decent instinct rather than a mean one. And there are things that arrive in a life that cannot be entered on it, and the reason is not that they are too small. And nobody has ever made you sit down and try to file one.

He Is Not Being Supplied By Anybody

There is a sentence in Acts, said by Paul standing in a city full of temples, and it is aimed precisely at people who believed the gods needed something from them.

That is the context and it matters. He is speaking to an audience whose entire religious economy was built on supply going upward.

"Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things."Acts 17:25

As though He needed any thing.

That clause dismantles the whole arrangement his audience was standing in. And then the reason given is not that God is above needing things or too great to bother. The reason is that He is the one doing the giving, and the list is life, and breath, and all things.

Breath is on the list. Specifically. By name.

You have been supplied rather than expected to supply. Acts 17 puts breath on the giving side in front of an audience who assumed the traffic went the other way, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and sits it on a flat rock on a headland with five hundred million in somebody's head.

And notice how the sentence is built. It is not saying God gives generously and also has needs elsewhere. It is saying the direction is one way, in a place where everybody present had built their lives on it being two.

You were never a supplier in this arrangement. That is what the written word says in the middle of a city that believed otherwise, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that land in a man who has been running a page since he was twenty.

Nothing At The End Of This Goes On Your Page

Now say it plainly, because this is the landing category and the way these pages end is this whole site's guarantee.

Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no schedule, no commitment, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

You will not finish this page with an entry to make. There is no line at the bottom.

And the page itself is not being taken off you. Keeping some account of what you have been given is a decent way to live and this article is not asking anybody to stop noticing.

It is that some things do not fit on it, and that this is not a failure of your accounting.

You have not been put in anybody's debt by five hundred million breaths. It is written that He giveth to all life and breath and all things, which is a sentence with no return clause anywhere in it, and His Spirit is the one who has been on that headland with you for thirty years of evenings.

And you are as fully His having never once acknowledged a single breath, because the giving in Acts 17 is not conditional on the receiving being noticed, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from opening a column.