The Man from Ghana and the Spark of Life
“He himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.” — Acts 17:25
Today, quite by chance, I briefly met a man from Ghana in a supermarket. It was an ordinary encounter, but afterwards it prompted me to explore something of the languages and thought of Ghana. In doing so, I came across an Akan word that arrested me: kra.
Kra is sometimes translated as “soul,” “life-force,” or “divine spark,” though none quite captures its meaning. In traditional Akan thought it is associated with the life-principle received from God, Nyame, and with a person’s destiny. What struck me was the implication that life is not simply something we possess, but something we have received.
We speak naturally of “my life,” yet life is unlike almost anything else we call ours. I did not acquire it, construct myself, or choose to exist. Before I could possess anything, understand anything or make a single choice, I was already alive. There is something humbling in that. Life is less a possession than an entrustment.
This brought me back to a question raised by the scientist James Tour. Imagine a living cell being studied in a laboratory. Suddenly it dies. Much of its physical substance remains: the molecules and structures have not simply vanished. Yet an unmistakable boundary has been crossed. A moment ago it was alive; now it is not. What has been lost?
Biology can describe what fails when a cell dies, and kra should not be mistaken for a scientific explanation. Yet the two perspectives bring us to an intriguing threshold. Science can investigate the mechanisms of living things with astonishing precision, while the transition from life to death still confronts us with the deeper question of what it means for anything to be alive at all.
With a human being the question becomes more intimate. We are cells, organs, proteins, electrical impulses and intricate chemistry, but we are also beings who love, remember, hope, suffer, create and ask what our lives mean. The machinery is extraordinary, but so is the person whose machinery it is.
That is what I found so compelling in kra. It changed the grammar of the question for me. Instead of simply saying, “I have a life,” I found myself thinking, “I have been given life.” And if life is given and the question is not only what I will get from it, but what I will do with what has been entrusted to me. Consider Psalm 15.
Strangely, all of this began with two people briefly crossing paths in a supermarket. He went his way and I went mine, but the encounter led me to an African word, from that word to a scientist’s question, and from that question to an ancient biblical claim: life is something we receive before it is ever something we possess.
I did not make myself alive. I found myself alive. And that is wonder enough to begin with.