A common feature at work in all of this living is that things are given and things are recieved.  Breath, rest, words, food, excrement, handiwork, sensations, ideas, bodies, and intentions--each of them, the very stuff of life, are given and each of them are recived.  Life is this giving.

A guiding axiom: life is givenness

A theological version of this axiom: life is grace.

Grace names what comes as a gift.  In short, grace names what is given.  Or, more precisely, as Jean-Luc-Marion puts it, grace names the givenness of whatever is given and received.

Givennes names the giving and receiving that constitute life.  It names our interdependence.  It names a dynamic process of exchange, of giving and receiving, acceptance and conversion, that is always already dependent on things outside of itself.  here, to be alive, to give and receive, is to be in an open relation of interdependence with the world for food, air, words, materials, sensations, and companionship.
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The primary difficulty faced in approaching life in terms of grace is that grace so easily slips the knot of our attention.  Our preoccupation with what is given and received so easily eclipses any awareness of its having been given, of its givenness.  How easy it is to receive a gift from someone and, in light of its heft, shine, and appeal, forget that it is a gift.  How difficult it is to keep its gifted-ness at the forefront of our attention.

Addressing ourselves to the givenness of life (and not just to what is given), will require a kind of focused attention that we don't generlaly employ.  We will have to attend to the immediacy of life with a kind of awareness that we rarely bring to bear.  We will have to shift down a few gears, ease off the gas, and be patient enough to linger with the given-ness of the present moment.  If we are racing off to somewhere else, we will see only what is given and its givnness will fail to appear.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 4-5