How Much More Is Not A Figure

Kirsty asks what the catch is about everything and she is right to, and this article is going to answer her properly rather than tell her she is being cynical.

She is fifteen. She has been offered a free phone upgrade that was not free. A free trial that took two years to get out of. A free ticket to a thing that turned out to be a two hour presentation. A free week at a gym that required a card and a cancellation notice in writing.

She is not damaged. She is calibrated. Those are different, and adults get them confused constantly, and it makes teenagers stop listening.

Her dad, who is a joiner and does not talk in paragraphs, gets this about her in a way that other people do not.

She asked him in the kitchen once, over homework, what he wanted her to do about church, because he had never once made her go and everybody else's dad seemed to have an opinion.

He said, "Nothing."

She said that is not an answer.

He said: "It is, though. I don't want anything off you about it. If you go, you go. If you don't, you don't. I'm not after anything."

She said, and this is the sentence that got him: "Everyone's after something."

He thought about it. He is a slow talker and it took him a while.

And then he said: "Ask me for something. Anything. Go on."

She asked for a lift to Sunniva's on Friday, which is twenty minutes each way and he had said no the week before because of work.

He said: "Fine. Friday."

She said what is that supposed to prove.

And he said: "I'm not going to bring it up. Not on Friday, not next week, not when we argue. That's what I'm after. Nothing."

She said afterwards that it did not convert her and it did not resolve anything and that she has thought about it approximately once a week since.

You may ask the same question, and if you do, you are not being difficult. Everything that arrives free in ordinary life has a mechanism attached, and a person who has been caught a few times gets sensible about it. And nobody has ever answered your question straight instead of telling you to be less suspicious.

Jesus Uses The Most Ordinary Comparison Available

There is a line in the middle of a talk about asking that does not reach for anything spiritual. It reaches for a parent and a piece of food.

"If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?"Matthew 7:11

Read the comparison, because the comparison is doing all the work.

He does not say God is generous in a way you could not imagine. He says: you know what an ordinary parent does when a child asks for something to eat. You have seen it. It is not remarkable and it is not a transaction and nobody brings it up afterwards.

And then he says the phrase this article is named for. How much more.

You have been given a comparison you can actually check. Matthew 7 grounds the whole thing in a parent handing over what was asked for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a first century argument and sits it at a kitchen table with homework on it.

Now the important part for a person calibrated like Kirsty. How much more is not a figure. It is not a promise of a quantity and it is not a claim that you will get what you ask for in the form you asked for it. It is a statement about the direction and the character of the giver, and it deliberately stops there.

That matters, because if it said more than that it would be the thing she suspects. Anything that promises a specific return is a mechanism. This does not promise a specific return. It describes Somebody and leaves the outcome where the outcome actually is.

You have been told what He is like rather than sold what He will do. That is what the written word says and where it stops, and it is the Spirit of God who makes the difference between those two things visible to somebody who has learned to look for the small print.

So Here Is The Catch, Answered Straight

Now let this page answer the question rather than dodging it.

There is no catch on this site. That is a checkable claim, not a reassuring one, so check it. There is no figure anywhere in this article. No proportion, no percentage, no threshold, no practice you are being enrolled in, no sign-up sheet, no membership, no email, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere, including this one.

There is no request at the end. Go and look. The end of this article is a physical action involving nobody but you.

And if money is tight in your house, and in a lot of houses it is, then there is nothing here aimed at you sideways either. No small amount hinted at. No suggestion about giving time instead. Nothing.

You have not been enrolled in anything by reading a page. It is written that the gift of God is not of works, lest any man should boast, which removes the mechanism entirely rather than making it gentler, and His Spirit is the one who has been in the room during every conversation where somebody was after something.

And you are fully welcome here having asked the catch question out loud, because the question is fair and the answer is nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from being the exact thing it is describing.