None of Them Are You
1 Corinthians 4:7 · 1 Chronicles 29:14 (NIV)
Inside you, right now, your digestive tract carries a population.
Bacteria, fungi, archaea and other microorganisms live there, alongside viruses. Gut bacteria help break down some food components we cannot digest on our own. Microbes also interact with the immune system and produce substances involved in signalling between the gut and the rest of the body.
None of them are you.
The bacteria are organisms with genomes of their own. They are not human cells. You share a body with a community whose work contributes to your life.
And you did not choose the first arrivals.
Microbial colonisation develops during and after birth. Evidence does not establish a resident microbiome in a healthy fetus before birth. Maternal contact, feeding, other people and the environment help shape the early community. It keeps changing as we grow. By the time you could have an opinion, the arrangement was running.
The numbers have a history worth being honest about.
For decades the standard line was that microbes outnumber your own by ten to one. That figure traces to one rough calculation from 1972. Somebody took about a kilogram of intestinal material, multiplied by a hundred billion microbes per gram, and compared it to a common estimate of the body's own. Ten to one.
In 2016, Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo published a careful recount in PLOS Biology. For a 70-kilogram reference man they estimated roughly thirty-eight trillion bacteria against roughly thirty trillion human cells. Closer to one to one.
The researchers said plainly that the revision takes nothing away from the importance of what is in there.
Three things this word will not do.
It gives no medical advice. What anybody should eat or take is between them and somebody qualified, and much of what gets sold on the strength of this science has not been shown to work.
It does not present the estimates as settled. The old number was a back of an envelope and the new one is an estimate with its arithmetic shown.
And it draws no conclusion about anybody's health. Some people reading this are unwell and did nothing to cause it.
Paul asks a question in one sentence that takes the floor out from under a whole argument.
He is writing to a congregation that had been ranking its teachers and taking sides. Into that, he puts this.
What do you have that you did not receive?
1 Corinthians 4:7, NIV. Paul follows the question by challenging their boasting about what they have received.
The question works as an audit rather than a dismissal. Go through it. The language you think in. The country you were put down in. The capacity for the work you are good at. The population in your gut that has been keeping you alive since before you could speak.
Then the Chronicler, setting down a prayer at the end of a long life.
David has gathered materials for a temple he will not live to see built, and the people have given generously, and he prays this over it.
Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand.
1 Chronicles 29:14, NIV.
David recognises that the resources for their generosity came from GOD. Their willing work matters, but it does not make them the source of everything they offer.
Faith takes me from that gratitude to a confession: GOD is the source of life, dependent on no giver before HIM.
The microbiome does not prove that confession. Biology describes relationships within living systems. Scripture leads me to receive life as gift. HE sustains what I cannot sustain alone, and HIS generosity gives my work a different starting place.
It does leave me thinking about how much of what I call mine arrived without my knowledge or consent.
Somebody reading this is exhausted from holding it all up.
You have been carrying the sense that letting go of any of it would bring it down. The job, the family, the health, the faith. All of it feels like it runs on your grip, and the tiredness comes from believing you are the foundation.
You do not sustain all of it by yourself. Even your body lives through relationships you did not design. That does not erase your responsibilities. It makes room to receive help with them.
That is no reason to stop working. The people who gave for that temple gave a great deal.
David’s prayer makes room for both the gift and the work. People really make things, care for others, and give generously. They do so with lives and capacities they did not create from nothing.
This does not resolve the suffering of somebody who is ill. Microbial communities can contribute to health and disease, and many of those relationships remain under study. A reflection on receiving gives nobody grounds to blame a patient.
What holds is that you received all of it, and that HE received none of it, and that the difference between those two sentences is the whole distance between a creature and GOD.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
🙏 To Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo, who recounted a number everybody had been repeating for forty years and showed their arithmetic.
🙏 To the one who is ill this morning through no fault of their own, and has been asked more than once what they did.
🙏 To the one who believes the whole arrangement runs on their grip, and has not slept properly in months because of it.
🙏 To everybody who handed something to a newborn without knowing it, in the first week, before anybody could say thank you.
Grace and Peace.
Sources: The supplied build logic identifies 1440 Sunday Edition, September 27, 2026, as the morning news prompt. Scientific checks: Sender, Fuchs and Milo, PLOS Biology (2016); Kennedy and colleagues, Nature (2023); NIH microbiome overview. Scripture: 1 Corinthians 4:7 and 1 Chronicles 29:14, New International Version (NIV).
Today’s Sabbath continues this reflection: Request Somebody Handed It to You →