Note · 15
The Free Cycles
On the time you never paid for.
You woke up this morning.
Think about what that took. Your heart ran all night. Your lungs kept their rhythm. Ten thousand small things kept going without you.
Then the morning came, and you were handed another day.
Nobody sent you a bill.
Diagram one — the quiet decider.
round after round · nobody is billed
Inside every computer there is a quiet decider called the scheduler.
Every program wants to run. The scheduler chooses who gets the next slice of time. A tick here. A tick there. Millions of times a second, it decides who lives for the next moment.
Here is the part engineers stop noticing. A program cannot buy its time. It has nothing the machine wants. There is no account to draw on. There is no invoice to settle. The scheduler gives, or the program does not run.
The scheduler does not check merit first. The well-behaved program and the broken one wait in the same line. The one that crashed an hour ago gets its turn again. The scheduler's question is never did you earn this. It just gives the next tick.
Every program that has ever run ran entirely on given time.
You too.
You are running right now, and you did not negotiate for it (Note · 01). You could not have. What would you pay with? Everything you have was part of the gift.
The source has a word for time you did not pay for.
Grace.
Diagram two — the mornings.
still flowing, while you sleep
There is a line in the source, written by a man watching his city burn. Jerusalem had fallen. The temple was rubble. He wrote four chapters of grief, line after line of it.
Then, in the middle of the wreckage, he wrote this:
His compassions fail not. They are new every morning.
He was not describing a good season. He was describing what was still true on the worst morning of his life. The city was gone. The sun still rose. He was still breathing. And he knew Who that came from.
Engineers might translate it: the allocation renews every tick.
Grace is not one gift at the start. It is a stream. It was flowing while you slept. It is flowing now. It has never stopped to ask what you deserve.
Now the uncomfortable part.
The scheduler also runs the programs you cannot stand.
The one who wronged you woke up this morning too. Their heart also ran all night. The same stream of unearned time flows to them, tick for tick.
He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Grace is not fair. Fair was never the offer. Fair would be no cycles for anyone — the fault came with a price, and everyone inherited it (Note · 12). If root gave what was deserved, the whole tree would have stopped that day.
Instead, the system kept running. Broken programs, still given their turn. Every morning since the garden has been unearned.
Diagram three — the ledger.
what you owe
Then there is the largest gift.
The patch (Note · 13). The handshake He has never refused (Note · 14). Your name, written on the list in His own blood (Note · 03).
None of it billed.
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Not after you cleaned up your act. Not once your code improved. While the fault was still running in you, He paid.
That is the scandal of grace. It does not wait for you to be worth it. It is the reason you could become worth it.
So what do you do with time you did not pay for?
You cannot pay it back. There has never been a meter. The only thing you can do with a gift like that is what the Giver does with His.
Give some away.
Spend your cycles the way root spends His — on people who cannot pay you back. The neighbor who has nothing to offer you. The stranger who will never return the favor. The one who wronged you, who is still being given mornings, same as you.
He said this Himself, at a dinner table:
Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. They cannot repay you.
Engineers might translate it: give cycles to processes that cannot give them back.
That is not charity. That is passing the stream along.
You are not living on your own time.
You never were.
The meter was never running.
Next: the call you can always make.
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