Loved Without A Reason Being Owed

Kimo asks what things cost. It is the first thing out of his mouth about almost anything and he is fifty-six and it is not going to change on its own.

It is not about money, or not mostly. It is a question about conditions.

His family came off the land in a particular way in a particular decade and everything after that arrived with something attached. The house came with a scheme and the scheme came with a clause. The job came with a bond. The scholarship his sister got came with four years of somewhere she did not want to be. Even the good things, and there were good things, arrived carrying a second thing, and by the time he was about eleven he had learned to look for it before anything else.

So he asks what it costs. About a lift. About a meal. About an invitation to a thing on a Saturday.

His nephew's girl, who is twenty-four and does not know the family history because nobody has told her properly, put a plate in front of him at a beach cook up in February and he said, before he could stop himself, "What do I owe you for this?"

She laughed. She thought he was being funny.

And then she looked at his face and she was not sure and it went slightly odd, and she said, "Uncle, it is a plate of food."

He said afterwards, to his brother, in the car, that it was the first time in his adult life he had heard the question from the outside.

His brother said, "You have always done that."

He said, "I know."

His brother said, "Dad did that."

And Kimo did not say anything else for the rest of the drive, because he had genuinely never once connected the two.

You may ask the same question. It might not be out loud. It might be a fast internal check that runs before you accept anything, and it might come from something that happened to your family before you were born, and it is not paranoia, it is a piece of equipment that was fitted for good reasons. And nobody has ever put in front of you a promise with the condition explicitly removed.

He Puts The Word Freely In Himself

There is a line at the end of Hosea, which is a book largely about a people who had every reason to expect a bill, and the sentence contains a word that is doing all of the work.

"I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him."Hosea 14:4

I will love them freely.

He puts the word in Himself. Nobody had to ask for it and nobody had to negotiate it in. In a book that has spent thirteen chapters being extremely direct about what a people had done, the closing promise has the condition removed inside the sentence, by the One making it.

That is not the same as a promise that happens to have no condition. It is a promise that names the absence of the condition out loud, which is a different thing, and it is the difference that matters to a person who checks.

You have been handed a promise with the small print explicitly stated as absent. Hosea 14 puts the word freely into the sentence rather than leaving it to be inferred, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it on a beach at a cook up in February.

And notice where it sits in the book. It is at the end. After everything. After the account of what happened and why. The word freely does not appear at the start where it would be cheap; it appears at the end where it is expensive, and it is spoken by the One who has been most wronged in the story.

You were loved with the condition named and removed, by Somebody who had the standing to attach one. That is what the written word does at the close of Hosea, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a single adverb land in a man who has been checking for the clause since he was eleven.

The Answer To Your Question Is Nothing

Now let this page answer Kimo's question rather than smiling at it.

There is no condition attached to anything on this site. Not a soft one, not a later one, not an implied one.

No figure appears in this article. No proportion, no percentage, no threshold, no practice you have been enrolled in, no sign-up sheet, no membership, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

And if things are tight for you, then there is nothing aimed at you sideways either. No small amount hinted at, no suggestion of time instead of money, and no observation about what people in your position often find.

That is the answer. It is nothing. You can check the rest of the page.

You have nothing to price here. It is written that we are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and freely is the same word doing the same job in the same register, and His Spirit is the one who has been beside you through every internal check you have ever run before accepting anything.

And you are fully welcome today without a clause anywhere behind it, because a promise that names the absence of a condition is the only kind that reaches a person built the way you are built, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from having a second thing attached.