When a friend and I took a walk after church, she told me about the new job she’d just landed at a prestigious company. “I give all glory to God,” she said, with the zeal of a new believer. She was elegant in her wool coat and cashmere scarf, which she tightened in the wind. This friend had recently come to faith in Christ, and after she joined my small group in the fall of 2020, we began praying for a new job opportunity for her.
“I had nothing to do with manifesting it,” my friend added.
“What’s ‘manifesting’?” I asked.
“You’ve never heard of manifestation?” she said, a little astonished.
When I Google it later, to understand the origins, the first article appears on Oprah Daily. It tells me manifestation has to do with the wildly best-selling book of 2006 called The Secret. It has to do with the phenomenon of “making everything you want to feel and experience a reality . . . via your thoughts, actions, beliefs, and emotions.”
Presuming Godlike Powers
Manifestation, in other words, is the very opposite of receiving your life from God. It’s receiving your life from the universe in the measure that you’ve “attracted” it to yourself: by focus, by hard work, by intention. According to the article, you can embrace one method of “productive” manifestation popularized on TikTok in which you write down what you want in the following pattern: three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon, and nine times at night for 33 or 45 days.
Manifestation is the very opposite of receiving your life from God.
I can’t help but think how uniquely modern and privileged this impulse is, to “manifest” our lives rather than receive them. A serf in medieval Europe couldn’t have manifested a life beyond the manor and the protection afforded there. A slave in early America couldn’t have manifested a life beyond the plantation and the threat of death. Even a woman in the early 20th century couldn’t have manifested the kind of financial independence possible for women today.
Only in our modern, technological world can we presume godlike powers for achieving our ends. Surely a hundred years ago, before the invention of antibiotics and insulin and vaccines, we held fewer illusions about the realities we could and could not control. It’s in no way coincidental that time management, as an industry, grows up in the Industrial Revolution. The ethics of time management tell us we’re in control of time, not held captive to its limits and contingencies.
Seeing the Source
It’s an act of resistance today to consider not that we’re “manifesting” our lives but that we’re receiving them as a gift. This is, of course, the message of Genesis—and the heartbeat of the gospel. God makes. God gives. This world, ordered as it is by sun and moon, day and night, is our inheritance. God gave us his only Son, in time, that we might have life.
Stand under his sky—and open wide your mouths!
To think of all good things coming from the good hands of God, even time itself, is to see that the hours aren’t simply kept. They’re bestowed. They’re bequeathed. They’re like the goods distributed from another’s estate: the bone china, the heirloom wedding ring, the marble-topped table, the moments called today. Before we can make something of our lives, even before we can offer them to God, we must be given the raw materials of body and place, even time itself.
Receiving from God
We are given our lives like winter coats for wintry days. This is as staggering and as subversive an assertion as baptism, which is itself a ceremony to figure all we’re receiving from God: identity, life, blessing, beginning. “God is the actor in baptism, the giver of the gift. . . . Baptism is irrevocable. . . . The initiate freely responds to God receiving baptism,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Baptism figures God as benefactor, us as beneficiary; God as giver, us as recipient. Baptism signals that we don’t wield the power to manifest reality, only to enter it, at God’s bidding, and to receive it, at God’s giving.
The hours aren’t simply kept. They’re bestowed. They’re bequeathed.
We are receiving our lives, not simply living and making them. I think of W. H. Auden’s poem “Horae Canonicae,” which follows one person through the canonical hours, or a waking day. At the first hour, “Prime,” the speaker of the poem shakes off sleep. This awakening, however, is not an act of agency; it’s a summons. The speaker is “recalled from the shades to be a seeing being / From absence to be on display.” This first moment of drawing breath is occasion for remembering the nature of worship, that it’s an act of grateful response to God for all he’s given.
A gift is a thing to be received, not demanded and certainly not repaid. Imagine that we might, with God’s help, conceive of the hours in this way.
The Gospel Coalition