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I once went on a blind date. He was a law student, a friend of a friend, and I was a seminarian. We met for drinks.

He was nice, funny. He was a self-identifying Christian--the first one, actually, I had ever gone out with. We were talking about our chosen professions; he was, as many are, fascinated by the idea of a call to ministry. My call story is not exactly dramatic, but it has a social justice edge, forged on youth group mission trips and in researching poverty. “I want to make the world a better place,” I told the date.

The future lawyer looked at me and asked, “But isn’t the world a fallen place?”

With every cycle of our respiratory systems, we are sustained by the same intimate inspiration God exhaled into Adam’s muddy lungs. That breath permeates every cell of our being, nose to toes, invigorating our bodies and minds and souls until it is ready to be released, silently, from the same nostrils through which it came.

This is as ordinary as oxygen and carbon dioxide, and as extraordinary as spirit and miracle.